Omoda 9 review

Good News! There are no major faux pas in here. The setup of all the controls is entirely conventional: drive selector stalk on the right, wipers on the left, temperature and fan speed dials atop the centre console, two big screens standing proud on the dashboard. And a big round thing for changing direction. Nothing you haven’t seen before.

The touchscreen is massive, and comes with a handy little shelf to rest your hand as you use it. Thank heavens, because it’ll be perched there a lot. The graphics are a bit dreary but mostly make sense, though we found it bizarre how there were separate (and very fiddly) icons for the steering and suspension settings. The capacitive buttons on the steering wheel need a firm press, or they just don’t work. Lots of room for improvement.

Helpfully, you can swipe down from any screen to access customisable shortcuts, including an off-switch for the speed limit warning and lane keep, if they’re bothering you. Swipe up from the bottom and you’re straight into air con and climate controls.

Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are standard, and you can swipe Google Maps over onto the main driver display so you can keep the touchscreen open. Switching between phone mirroring and the native menus is tricky: Omoda says you can set up a shortcut for that, but you shouldn’t need to fix a shortfall like that yourself.

The materials are about what you’d expect from a £45k car. The only thing we didn’t really like was the plasticky centre console cover, which already looked scratched on our test car.

It looks roomy. Is it?

It certainly is up front, although the raised centre console eats into the sense of space; odd choice for a car this unengaging. But at least you get plenty of storage, wireless phone charging pads, and a fan-cooled box under the armrests for when you’re sent out to pick up some milk.

In the back, knee room is excellent and foot room is too provided those up front have jacked up their seats. The bench is quite flat, but the outermost seats recline electronically. Nice. You can feasibly fit someone in the middle seat because the floor is flat, though anyone over six foot (or sporting a voluminous hair do) might struggle for head space. The panoramic sunroof helps the sense of light back here. Can’t find the USB ports? They flip out from the bottom of the central storage block: one’s a USB, the other USB-C. Let the arguments commence in 3… 2… 1…

You know what I’m going to ask next…

Boot space?

Got it in one.

You’ve got 660 litres of luggage capacity back there, or 1,783 litres with the seats down. The floor is flat but about thigh high, and there’s only room underneath for a charging cable. There’s a cutout by the wheelarch on the left but not the right, weirdly, and when you look closely there’s a big rut of wasted space between the back seats and the boot’s undergubbins. So Omoda’s left some packaging gains on the table for the facelift…