Among the strengths of the Jaecoo 7’s petrol-electric powertrain, we can certainly credit good mechanical isolation, fairly strong and seamless accelerator response, and good urban efficiency (to which we’ll come shortly).
It behaves more like a series-hybrid arrangement at low speeds than a parallel one. The car negotiates town roads as though it were entirely electric, with the combustion engine remaining disconnected from the drive wheels and running only to generate current as needed.
Plenty of performance is on tap even without direct piston power. The proof of that came during our recorded standing start acceleration runs when, even under full throttle, the moment at which the combustion engine fully connected to the driving wheels, above 50mph, could clearly be felt.
In its slightly mysterious way, then, the Jaecoo 7 SHS got to 62mph from rest in 7.7sec, 0.8sec sooner than the claims said it should. It never felt sluggish or flustered, even during motorway driving, and it remained fairly refined even with its piston engine running hard in the background.
There are a great many driving modes to tinker with – almost certainly more than there need to be. You can run the car in EV or HEV modes, the former only when there’s enough charge in the battery. In HEV, you can choose between Initial, Smart and Forced hybrid running regimes. Initial prioritises electric running until the battery’s flat; Forced allows you to pick a battery charge percentage for the hybrid system to maintain; and Smart lets the car decide how much charge to maintain in its drive battery based on various inputs.
With all of those modes, however, the car will almost always protect an indicated baseline battery charge level of about 15% to 20%. In practice, this means that while the instruments will tell you there’s still somewhere between eight and 12 miles of electric range left to use, the hybrid system won’t actually let you access them. Not, that is, until you find the EV+ driving mode hidden away on another touchscreen menu, which opens up those last few miles but which, a warning message advises, “is only to be used in emergency situations”.
So what would otherwise be fairly simple top-level drivability in the Jaecoo 7 is rendered rather complicated and ultimately a little frustrating. The company would do much better to simply forget the EV+ mode, recalibrate the car’s electric range instrumentation and give the driver unfettered access to whatever really usable EV range remains – as most PHEV manufacturers do.