2025 Jaecoo J8 Ridge review

The ongoing influx of new Chinese brands into Australia is made even more challenging to track when a brand like Chery introduces a new brand name to the mix, in the form of Omoda Jaecoo. The explanation is that the Omodas are swoopy, sporty things while the Jaecoos are more traditional-looking SUVs. While also still selling SUVs under the Chery name.

Sure. On the other hand, one looks at the seemingly convoluted Chery empire in China, and we got off lightly. Chery has quickly introduced a range of models to Australia, starting with the Omoda 5 and the entertainingly named Tiggo 7.

The models arriving now seem more confident and mature and this J8 looks promising both in the metal and on paper. It’s got a high spec, a mid-price and low drama with a long warranty. Seems like a promising start.

As I’ve already said, the Jaecoo half of the Omoda Jaecoo brand is all about “traditional” SUV shapes. One might say the mood room at design HQ was peppered with much more expensive cars than the J8 and what we have here is a car very much inspired by the Range Rover Velar. Given that’s a car I find very easy on the eye, I’m okay with that.

The J8 slots in above the rather Evoque-ey J7 in the range and alongside sleeker Omoda counterparts.

Despite its lanky dimensions, the J8 is a five-seater large SUV. While not as obviously large, it kind of feels like the route taken by Audi with the Q8 to deliver a more passenger-focussed large SUV with a lot of cargo space.

The Ridge is the second of the two-car J8 line-up and is the higher spec, coming at $54,990 drive-away, a neat $5000 more than the entry-level Track. Both of them are cheaper than their more obvious Korean and Japanese competitors and a little more pricey than their compatriots, but not significantly so.

The Track ships with 20-inch alloys, keyless entry and start, auto LED headlights with auto high beam, auto wipers, powered and heated exterior mirrors, panoramic sunroof, power windows and tailgate, satellite navigation, 12.3-inch instrument and media screens, head-up display, 12-speakers, wireless phone charger, quilted leather seats, front seats with power adjustment, massage function, heating and cooling, leather wheel, dual-zone climate control and a full-size spare.

The extra $5,000 for the Ridge tested here adds all-wheel drive, continuous damping control, off-road modes, Michelin rubber, parking assist, electric door handles, heated and ventilated outboard rear seats, a fragrance system, and an auto-dimming rearview mirror.

Unusually, I would say the extra expense is well-spent, as it brings useful features to the J8, particularly the better tyres that complement the all-wheel drive. It also adds side airbags for the rear seats, making it worth the extra cost just for that if you’re carrying passengers in the back. While the tyres are better they are – bafflingly – Michelin ePrimacy tyres that, as far as I am aware, are aimed at EVs and hybrids for their low rolling resistance.

With a relatively unknown brand like Jaecoo, a trip to its very slick website is a good start. There you’ll find the spec sheet, dealer locations and the ability to book a test drive. A drive should definitely be at the top of your list because, again, this is a fairly new brand to Australia.

It would also be worth checking out its rivals, like the Mitsubishi Outlander Exceed and Kia Sorento, although both are more expensive.

Stock levels are currently strong according to parent company Chery, with 200 J8s in both Track and Ridge levels across the country.

Omoda Jaecoo has a fairly decent dealer network up and running and visiting your nearest should also help you decide whether servicing with the brand is doable given it doesn’t have the coverage of its more established rivals.

Be sure to check out the deals on Drive Marketplace too, because there are plenty of examples of rival SUVs with warranty balances remaining.

For a five-seater, the Jaecoo J8 is a lot of car at 4820mm. It’s also worth noting the length of the wheelbase, a generous 2820mm. That translates to a lot of occupant space, and the car’s overall length delivers plenty of cargo space as well.

Speaking of which, you start with a to-the-roof figure of 738 litres. Even so, you’re probably still looking at a decent 500 or so litres and with the seats down and the bets off, you’ll have 2021 litres to fill. That’s quite substantial and more competitive than most in this segment.

The J8’s powered tailgate makes access very easy and the floor is flat with a not-too-high loading lip. The intrusion from the wheel arches is remarkably small so it’s wide enough to take an Ikea load. Maybe keep that one quiet.

Moving to the rear seats, there is tons of leg, head and shoulder room for outboard passengers as well as the extra comfort of the Ridge’s heating and cooling functionality. You’ll also find two USB-C ports and vents with their own fan control. The panoramic sunroof doesn’t knock out too much headroom, either. With the blind retracted, the already spacious interior feels absolutely massive.

The folding armrest has two cupholders, as you might expect, and the doors have large pockets and a bottle holder each. The passenger front seat has controls for back seat passengers to roll it forward if there’s nobody in it, or you really like annoying the person who is.

Up front are two very comfortable heated and cooled seats with power adjustment every which way. There is also a massage function and very adjustable lumbar support. Bizarrely, in a world with so few drive-in cinemas, the front seats feature a leg rest that rises up in an old-school business class style. Maybe they’re good for stargazing through the panoramic sunroof? Either way, it’s a nice feature and might play well with the Saturday morning sport crowd.

The very sparsely furnished centre console has a rotary dial to select the driving mode and a physical volume control for the sound system. The split lid armrest is integrated, providing one long surface, and the storage bin underneath is cooled, too, with a little dial to control the flow of cool air or switch it off completely.

As with many SUVs, it features a flying console with a storage area underneath, which is handy for stashing small bags.

Lift your eyes to the dashboard and there’s been some more homage work in the mood room. There are some very familiar or at least familiar-looking elements that wouldn’t be out of place in a Mercedes. That starts with the vents, which are at least plain old square (and, truth be told, more 1970s Renault-ish, which I dig), the stalk gear selector, the design of the start button, and the majestic sweep of the double-screen layout.

The textured woodgrain-style finish on the dash and console is also Mercedes-reminiscent and that’s no bad thing because the delivery is pretty good apart from a couple of missed fitments. It’s very comfortable and very calm.

The J8 ships with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, the former behaving reliably while the car was in my hands. The 50-watt wireless charger – with a built-in fan, no less – is very useful, but it didn’t always charge my phone without a bit of placement tweaking.

Like the GWM Havals, if you like your CarPlay/Auto wired, there are two USB ports in the centre console, but they’re on the passenger side, so it’s a bit of a faff to manage the cables. Although there is one USB-A and one USB-C, so everyone is covered.

Chery Omoda Jaecoo’s software package is pretty good, and I very much like the clear graphics on the dashboard. You can cycle through the range of available information easily with a button on the wheel and even make the entire screen the sat nav map with the speed discreetly pushed off to the left-hand side. You’ll still have the crisp and clear head-up display in front of you, too.

The 14 speakers all wear Sony badges, which is a delightful throwback to my youth. They’re pretty good, and because there are so many, you can drown out what little noise makes it into the cabin. Less convincing are the headrest-mounted speakers for phone calls. I mean, they work, but they were a bit tinny and, again, a bit of a throwback to my youth as I felt like I was on a landline. Nifty idea, though.

One of the reasons the software layout is so easy to use is that it’s homage to iOS and Android, which is fine because that’s what we’re all used to, and it means not having to learn what it all means.

There is an incredible amount of detailed setting information in the screen as well, right down to how the brake pedal feels. You can switch off a lot of the electronic nannies as well as control the fragrance from the under-dash trio of scent cartridges (sadly, Jaecoo didn’t supply any).

There appears to be two missing features in the Jaecoo. One is obvious – a smart key/card key. The driver’s side mirror has an NFC logo stamped on it, but it’s not mentioned anywhere on Jaecoo’s Australian website.

The second is any form of phone app. Both features were confirmed by Jaecoo as not currently available for Australian-delivered cars.

The J8 is significantly better than the Tiggo 7 I drove a few months ago. More of the systems work better more of the time, and that’s a solid result in a fairly short space of time.

But the adaptive cruise is poorly calibrated. The wheel nips aggressively as if you’re taking a dog’s favourite toy away, and then wrestles with you if you persist in guiding it in a slightly different way. I was never comfortable with the way it decided on a very specific bit of the tarmac ahead, and any of my inputs were resisted with extreme prejudice. I don’t know, maybe it thinks it’s a Tesla, but it’s too much.

Aside from that, the usual harbinger of doom - the driver attention detection - is a much gentler iteration than other Chery group cars I’ve driven and that was comforting. Overall, it’s a huge improvement on the Tiggo 7’s systems calibration but at the same time, does rather let the side down as when these things are done right, they’re great.

There is an immense number of systems and the level of customisation is impressive. I remember when I went into the Tiggo’s settings I was thinking that it had been well-calibrated but someone had switched almost everything off. In the J8, everything was on bar one function, which I switched back on, so again, that was a sign of good progress.

An indicative insurance figure came out at $2124 per year, based on a comparative quote for a 35-year-old male driver, living in Chatswood, NSW. Insurance estimates may vary based on your location, driving history, and personal circumstances.

That seems a bit high for this kind of car, perhaps on the wrong side of $2000 per year.

Jaecoo offers an eight-year/unlimited kilometre warranty as well as an eight-year capped-price servicing regime. Servicing is required every 12 months/15,000km and costs between $299 and $799, with prices fluctuating between these two figures.

Over the first three years, you’ll pay $927 or just over $300 per year. Over five, you’ll be up for $2025 with the average rising to $505 per year, and the full eight will cost you $3452 or about $431 per year. That fourth service is where they get you at $699.

Jaecoo claims 8.6L/100km for the all-wheel drive Ridge. I spent a week bombing around the suburbs as well as a run down the freeway. The overall figure for the week was 10.1L/100km which would deliver just under 650km from a full tank.

If you were to hit the claimed number you’d be nearer to 750km. I don’t think the official figure is out of reach but you’d have to work reasonably hard to get there.

Here in the Ridge, part of the $5000 price difference includes two big tickets items – adaptive damping and torque vectoring all-wheel drive. One is rather more successful than the other.

We’ll start with the adaptive damping. Weirdly, in Normal and Eco modes, it’s very jittery around town, like a poorly set-up air suspension system. It’s not teeth rattling, but you can feel the wheels fidgeting over the terrible state our arterial rounds are in after all that August rain. It’s probably the kind of thing owners will tune out because it’s moderate, but noticeable.

As speeds build, however, the ride smooths right out and whistling down the freeway to Wollongong for the J8’s photo shoot had photographer Blake and I marvelling at its composure.

At highway speeds, the engine is near silent, there is very little wind noise, the ride is lovely and you’ll just hear a rustle around the huge mirrors. This thing will eat miles with ease and we could cheerfully have completed a run to Canberra and back as we chatted away. It’s an incredibly comfortable cruiser.

Back in town and while we’ve dealt with the adaptive suspension, we haven’t talked about the throttle response. It’s very doughy in all but sport mode, with a reluctance to pick up the pace without a determined prod of the pedal.

Once you’ve got it spinning, it’s a wee bit on the coarse side as you approach the redline, but there’s plenty of go from the 2.0-litre four, spinning up 183kW and 385Nm to get this near two-tonne machine moving. The torque vectoring all-wheel drive system is very good at keeping things tidy, so much so I rarely saw the traction control light winking at me, which bodes well for what it might be like on the loose stuff.

The eight-speed torque converter automatic is mostly fine, but does suffer occasionally from twin-clutch style rollback (I had to check the spec sheet twice) and the lack of shifter paddles or manual mode was kind of annoying on a few occasions as, again, in normal mode it was hesitant to drop a few gears. I like using paddles to induce a bit of engine braking and because this engine is calibrated to coast, that would have been handy more often.

Steering is typically light and lacking in much feel, but it’s accurate. The adaptive suspension again came under fire from both myself and my wife for being less than capable of keeping the body upright in corners and the J8 did always feel on the heavy side. A sports SUV this isn’t. And that’s okay, it’s just that it looks like it could be.

There’s a very simple answer to this: no. There’s no published tow rating and you can’t get a towbar from Chery.

The J8 is an interesting car and so if you like interesting cars, you’re in the right place. It’s not interesting in the way a 1970s Citroen is, but it’s working in a bit of a niche, the luxury five seat SUV. It is indeed luxurious, absolutely packed with tech and comfort features and it looks the part both inside and out. If I had been local management, I’d have been tempted to lose the big Jaecoo badge in the grille and tone down the slightly lairy badging on the tailgate.

It's very comfortable, mostly very refined and performs well in most situations. It will certainly smash it out of the park as a daily family hauler, pounding around the burbs with ease and not costing very much while doing it.

You could look at rivals from Haval and further afield from Japan and Korea but you may just find yourself drawn to its good looks, reasonable price and extensive specification list. If you want a hybrid, however, you’ll have to look elsewhere in the range such as the Jaecoo J7 or the Omoda 9, or look to the aforementioned rivals.