Styling
It's a rather good-looking thing, the Omoda 9, without being a terrific or particularly striking piece of design. It's not massively standout in the wider SUV aesthetic sphere, and you could argue there's more than a hint of the Lexuses
NX and
RZ to the rear styling, but in general the Chinese new boy's appearance works well. It's only offered in a handful of colours, which are basically all the monochromatic shades of white, grey, silver and black plus one conservative dark blue, yet there's enough about the Omoda - such as those vertical front light signatures and the swooping roofline - to give it some eye-catching punch. The company will also sell the SUV with a 'one spec fits all' approach, meaning that the only option you can order up is one of those metallic paints, and therefore the 9 SHS rolls on the same attractive 20-inch alloy wheels no matter what you do come ordering time. They give the car just the right amount of design balance and stance accordingly.
Interior
It's largely good within the Omoda 9, but there are some foibles. Let's start with the positives, though. Materially, it's very classy inside the SUV and some fancy stitching on the door cards and seats helps with the ambience. Tech is handled by a gigantic 24.6-inch curved display incorporating the main infotainment screen and the digital instrument cluster, and there's a neat integration of the air-vent strip into the main dashboard. A few of the switches and knurled 'metals' used for switchgear look quite, um, Mercedes-y, but this is not one of those Chinese-car interiors that feels about 15 years behind the times.
As we said, however, a few things irk us, and likely will owners too, over the course of time. Such as the bizarre volume 'circle' on the far side of the touchscreen - it's far too far away from the driver to operate safely on the move, and even if it was the way you use it is counter-intuitive in the extreme; it might look like you rotate your finger to turn the volume up, but you don't, you simply tap the plus sign. Why make it look round when a rectangular volume control would've been more sensible in this instance?
And when you dig into the main infotainment, you find the organisation and 'clustering' of menu selections is not always the most straightforward, this issue nowhere more noticeable than when you want to adjust some of the chassis settings of the Omoda (like its regenerative brakes, its suspension, its steering and its throttle control) and the controls are not always all together in the same submenus.
Then there's the trip computer in the screen, which only
ever shows you the past 50km (31 miles) of your driving. You cannot reset it, you can't do anything more with it than that. So you've no way of knowing your long-term stats, while there are two further read-outs for the isolated fuel economy and electric usage that are utterly pointless, because each one is skewed by the other. As an example, on our test drive our car was showing that the plug-in hybrid drivetrain was achieving 47.9mpg overall... but made up of the petrol engine doing 108.7mpg and the electric portion peaking at a remarkable 5.8 miles/kWh. Eh? What?! What's the point of these two results totally countermanding the overall figure? What possible value do these meaningless read-outs give you?
Baffling. But, in the main, minimal drawbacks, rather than critical errors on the part of the Omoda 9 SHS. About the biggest gripe after all this carping is that the large central tunnel area does make the front two seating positions feel a bit more cosy and snug than we suspect most people would want from an SUV, but that is - again - a minor critical observation rather than a major one.
Practicality
Space is certainly not in short supply in the Omoda, because its 2.8-metre-long wheelbase provides plenty of legroom in the back of the cabin, even if three blokes squeezing into the back of it for a demonstration of the infotainment tech proved that headroom is in somewhat more limited supply - especially at the outer edges of the cabin, where the 9's roof curves in notably above the doors to meet the 1.3-metre, opening sunroof up top.
Nevertheless, five fully grown people could fit in the car at a push, although this is the point where we say for all its 4,775mm overall length, the rakish rear of the Omoda 9 and its SHS plug-in hybrid drivetrain means there is no seven-seat option even if you want it. Anyway, a 660-litre boot with all seats in use seems cavernous for the plain on-paper rating, even if looking at it in reality doesn't immediately make you think it's somewhere in between two of Skoda's most capacious wagons, namely the
Octavia Estate and the
Superb Estate.
We're therefore drawn back to one slight drawback, which is that the driver's seating position is too high-set relative to the body of the Omoda 9. Sure, people buy SUVs to sit all loftily above the road surface, but there's a difference between having a nice, low-mounted driver's seat in a vehicle body with a higher floor, and then trying to mimic the commanding pilot's position by simply jacking the chair up to the point it feels like it is nestling in the headlining. In the 9 SHS, you always feel like you're sitting
on the car, rather than
in it.
Performance
As touched upon a few times in the review already, the Omoda 9 SHS is a plug-in hybrid (PHEV), rather than a full EV - if it were zero-emission all the time, the company would call it the 'E9' to fit its current nomenclature patterns. And 'SHS' stands for 'Super Hybrid System' anyway.
In truth, that PHEV set-up is a complex one that doesn't just operate in the usual fashion you'd expect of PHEVs. In fact, it's almost more like a range-extended EV in the form of the
Nissan Qashqai e-Power in that for a lot of the time, the 157hp/215Nm 1.5-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine isn't in fact turning the wheels at all; it's simply acting as a generator for the 34.46kWh lithium-ion (LFP) battery pack. There are then two drive motors as part of what Omoda calls the 'three-speed Dedicated Hybrid Transmission' (DHT), which serve up another 225hp and 390Nm, yet the overall quoted outputs for the entire system are in advance of the sum-of-the-parts figure: the 9 SHS is supposed to have 449hp and 700Nm in total.
Confusingly, Omoda says this three-speed DHT has nine different working modes and then 11 gear combinations as well, which just sounds like mumbo-jumbo and makes our heads hurt. So we'll put it in a more simplistic manner that hopefully explains what driving the SUV feels like: it aims to provide a smooth, seamless, almost single-gear-like EV driving experience but with the long-haul, ease-of-use benefits of a PHEV drivetrain.
This includes a massive 70-litre fuel tank for the petrol engine and so if you brim both battery and combustion reserves, Omoda reckons this thing will carry you more than 700 miles in one hit without needing to visit either a filling station or a public charging point. Impressive stuff. And believable, because the car was hovering at nearly 50mpg during our test drive, which'd equate to 770 miles from 15.4 gallons (and some battery power). Further, the 9 SHS shouldn't ever fully deplete its battery, always reserving some of the cells for providing motive power so that it is operating more like a HEV at low levels of charge rather than a PHEV - the
Toyota RAV4 PHEV pulls much the same trick. All this, and Omoda still claims its 9 SHS can do 93 miles on electric power alone, which it describes as a 'class-leading PHEV figure' in this region of the world.
As to the straight-line performance, it's perfectly grunty enough, although even 449hp and 700Nm are slightly blunted by the Omoda's EV-like 2.2-tonne kerb weight. In the main, though, the way the gearbox works does come across as imperceptible in operation, so you just press the SUV's right-hand pedal and it goes, nice and swift. Admittedly, when you can hear the 1.5-litre four-pot engine, it's a long way from the most refined of its type that you'll ever encounter, but it's largely subdued and in the background during normal driving of the Omoda 9.
Ride & Handling
There are adjustable parameters in the Omoda 9's arsenal, allowing you to change various chassis elements according to how you want the SUV set up, but in all honesty we couldn't feel a huge amount of difference between any of them. Again, the dynamic report here is something of a mixed bag, because there are good bits and quite a few bad bits to tell you about, but we'd just about come down on the side of saying the 9 SHS drives admirably if you don't stretch it at all.
The low-speed ride comfort and the way it maintains dignity at open-road pace are both excellent, although there are times the unsprung mass of the 20-inch wheels makes itself known - the Omoda is a little too sharp-edged at dealing with the aftermath of bigger hits to its suspension. Linked to this, body movement is marked in the corners, which - along with lightweight and free-free steering - means hustling the SUV through a series of challenging corners is an imprecise and, ultimately, unrewarding affair.
It's not appalling, though, and it certainly feels like it can handle its reserves of power better than another
overpowered Chinese family chariot we tried recently, admittedly though that car was a 639hp EV rather than a 449hp PHEV. Grip and traction are both fine in the Omoda 9 SHS, and the ride-handling balance is pitched just the right side of 'softly comfortable' to make the SUV highly amenable to travel in. It's really quiet in the cabin at speed, for example, with superb sound-deadening obviously at work.
Our biggest dynamic bugbear is the brakes, which feel ludicrously over-servoed and snappy the first time you use them. The pedal bite isn't that pleasant either, with a wooden sensation to the first few centimetres of travel, and then the friction discs launch into action too sharply to make modulating the system as a novice a likeable task. The regenerative capabilities are fairly well judged, though, so if you can avoid stamping on the left-hand pedal in the footwell then you can drive the Omoda 9 SHS more smoothly in traffic, which is a boon.
Value
Providing astounding value is a Chinese hallmark and the Omoda 9 SHS is a prime exponent of that tactic. As we said earlier, it is £44,990 and the only cost extras are the paints, although watch the Hawk's Eye Grey finish as it's a four-figure upgrade. But everything else on the SUV is standard-fit, including things like ventilated and heated seats in four positions of the cabin, the panoramic sunroof, a 14-speaker Sony surround-sound system, a full camera system which is so comprehensive Omoda calls it '540 degrees' (no, we know...) - everything on it is complimentary, in effect, and there's a
lot of stuff fitted here. There's also a fantastic seven-year, 100,000-mile warranty backing everything up, and that mileage cap doesn't apply for the first three years of Omoda's cover.
Whether a 'kitchen sink' equipment list, loads of space, warranty cover to match Kia's industry-leading effort and then on-road performance to outstrip almost any of its rivals (0-62mph is supposed to be done with in 4.9 seconds) is enough to justify the 45-grand price tag or not remains to be seen, and obviously Omoda wants you to think of this as an SUV premium enough to tempt you out of truly luxury competitors like the
Volvo XC60 and its ilk, which is nevertheless priced broadly alongside something such as the
Hyundai Tucson PHEV. So is it a great bargain, or is it just cheap? It's very difficult to say, given the brand is so unheralded in this part of the world.
Verdict
The Omoda 9 SHS is a promising effort from the company and one of the better, more cohesive all-round products we've sampled from the Chinese market yet. It's by no means perfect and there are enough clunking details to it - such as the stupidly sharp brakes, the unrefined engine, the sometimes obstructive infotainment and the firmly padded, too-high-mounted driver's seat - that mean we can't quite unreservedly recommend it as a terrific value-for-money PHEV SUV.
However, if you sampled one and liked what you found for £45,000, we wouldn't blame you for coming to that conclusion in the slightest; there's more than enough good in the 9 SHS' offering that'll balance out the assortment of moderate negatives. Just a little extra polish and Omoda could be closer to breaking into the premium European elite quicker than you might at first imagine.
