Omoda 9 review

Pretty forgettable, to be honest. The steering (you can have it in Comfort or Sport) is as vague as it gets, offering no information about what the wheels are up to. This makes it snatchy through corners, because you have to tug at the wheel to correct your trajectory.

Body control isn’t too bad. The Omoda 9 doesn’t heave or pitch or wallow, but there’s not enough support from the bolsters. So even though it doesn’t lean much, you do. Hope you've got well-developed abs.

The ride is quite busy at low speeds, but improves the faster you go. Omoda lets you choose from three adaptive suspension settings (Normal, Mid and Sport) or assigns one depending on your drive mode. Of which there are six: Normal, Eco and Sport are the ones you might actually use; Snow, Mud and Off-road help fill a page in the brochure. Probably.

Tell me about the powertrain.

The 9 is great for wafting about without drama. Like a duck paddling furiously beneath the surface, you’re never really aware of what the engine and motors are up to. Omoda calls it the ‘Super Hybrid System’, and it can run single-motor only, dual-motor, engine only, engine and motors together, with or without regen, while charging on the move…

There’s some throttle lag but not much, so you don’t waste precious seconds waiting for an algorithm to decide how to move you forward. It’s brisk, but not breakneck quick – the most purposeful acceleration comes over 20-40mph, or 40-60mph, rather than from a standstill. Even when you go Full Send, the most the engine does is whirr fastidiously in the background. None of Toyota’s deafening CVT antics here.

The brake pedal’s pretty solid, but you’ll get used to it. Wind noise builds above 60mph, so at motorway speeds you’ll be raising your voice to have a conversation. The Sony sound system packs more than enough punch to overcome that.

Is it an mpg monster?

Like every PHEV, there’s a ludicrous number you’ll never hit and a more reasonable one you might. On the WLTP test the Omoda 9 achieves 201.8mpg, but that’s laughable because it assumes you start every journey with a full battery and drive the same distance in the same conditions exactly the same way every time. Pish. Leave it to do its own thing in hybrid mode and the claim is 43.6mpg – this tallies with what we saw on the trip computer on our test drive, but we need more time with the car to properly assess its efficiency credentials.

That goes for the range too. 93 miles from a 34.46kWh lithium-ion phosphate battery is the claim: typically we’d expect to see two thirds of that in real-world driving.

The Omoda 9 accepts a DC charge up to 70kW, so 30 to 80 per cent in 25 minutes. Given electricity prices at rapid chargers these days, there’s no point waiting that long. Plug it in at home and wake up to a full battery for peanuts.

The petrol tank’s 70 litres – Omoda reckons you’re good for 700 miles all in.