NEW Haval H6 hybrid review (inc. 0-100 & braking): Finally better than a RAV4?
HL has just updated the H6. There is a big old battle at the moment in the hybrid SUV segment, and these guys really want to get right on in there. They’ve taken 2 grand out of the price of this. So the H6 starts off at around $36,000, but this here being the topsp spec hybrid frontwheel drive is just under 44 drive away. So really good value for money. Today we’re going to do a detailed review of this car. So if you do want to skip ahead to other parts of this review, you can use the time codes that are on the screen or if you’re on YouTube, you can scroll down and use the chapters below. So in terms of the design highlights, the grill has grown. Look at the size of this thing. Um, this car’s always actually looked pretty good to me on the outside. So, um, you know, whether you take it or leave it, I don’t think it looks too bad. Down here, you’ve got full LED headlights with this LED strip down the bottom there as well. We’ll zip around to the side. They’ve kind of removed a lot of the chrome highlights that were on the H6 recently and gone down the path of blacking it all out. You can see here with the wheels, it’s got a piano black finish to it. 19-in alloy wheel with this wheel arch guard there. Uh, indicator built into the wing mirror with a 360 camera. Got a glass roof as well, privacy glass. Come around to the back with me. We’ve got full LED tail lights. You’ll notice as well that they’ve split that tail light design, so it doesn’t sort of connect in at the top there anymore. GWM, HEV, and H6 over there. So, HEV, hybrid electric vehicle. This is available as a plug-in hybrid as well, and also a non-plugin hybrid, but they have ditched the all-wheel drive petrol version. Uh, so you can only get all-wheel drive now in the hybrid setup. So, let me know what you reckon pricing in the comments section below. It’s taken a cut out. Do you think the styling has been improved? Let me know your thoughts. So, we’re inside the H6. We’ll start off with the key. You’ve got lock, boot, unlock, panic, h on the back. So, new key design. Very fancy. Uh, it’s got a push button start and proximity entry as well. Um, look, I I don’t love the light color here cuz if you’ve got kids, they’re going to destroy this pretty quickly, but this does feel like an upmarket and premium interior, especially for this price tag. One thing that is entirely bizarre to me though is this screen and the orientation. It’s angled that way. Like it feels like it’s angled that way. I don’t know if it actually is or not, but it feels like it’s built for a lefthand drive market. It sort of um doesn’t really tilt the way you need it to tilt. So, I don’t know if that was a mistake or what the go is with that, but um yeah, bit of a weird one. Outside of that though, uh touch points nice there in the center and decent on the door as well. How soft are they though? We’ve got our gurometer. We’ve tested the main surfaces in this cabin. If you do want to see how soft those surfaces are compared to other cars, there is a link in the description below. Build quality. Feels okay. All feels good. It’s what door slam sounds like. Do you have a H6? What’s it been like in terms of build quality and reliability? Let me know in the comments section below. Now, uh I thought I’d call out as well because we’ve already tested this car and it’s only really a minor update. I’m going to focus more on this and I’ll quickly just dart through the other stuff uh just cuz it’s based on the last car we already drove and I’ll just fill you in on the highlights there. Um so in terms of infotainment, you can see this monstrous new infotainment screen in the center replaces the older unit that was much slimmer and had a different entertainment system as well. So uh this basically brings with it all the latest functions that um the GWM brand has available to it. It’s really fast and easy to use. Uh when we were in Shanghai for the motor show just recently, they actually walked through a coffee OS as they call it and some of the stuff they have coming for it and you can see that they are dedicating a lot more time and effort into infotainment systems where I felt like it used to be a bit of a second thought to the car. They’re actually now putting a lot more emphasis uh and effort into this which is I guess good to see for consumers. So, uh, basically the standard system doesn’t have inbuilt satellite navigation, but it does come with smartphone mirroring in the form of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Uh, they’re wireless. So, I’ll show you what, uh, Apple CarPlay looks like. So, full screen integration there is a little bit laggy, and you can actually see if you It’s It’ll be a bit hard to see on the camera, but quality of it doesn’t really look overly sharp. It feels like they’ve taken a smaller resolution and then um just artificially increased it. Uh, and it’s just laggy as you can see there as I swipe between those screens. Um, the other frustrating part as well is there’s no easy way to get back to the home screen. You kind of got to, you know, you got to go looking here for the GWM button and then you go back through that way. It should actually retain this menu on the side. So, you can just flick straight back to the home screen for things like your climate functions. You can just sort of uh pilot through here if you want to, but it’s just not as elegant, I reckon. This is what Android Auto looks like. Uh so full screen again. Uh but yeah, like I said, as you can see, you’ve got to go through a couple of menus here to get back to the home screen, which is just a little bit um little bit average. You’ve got AM FM DAB digital radio and an eight speakeraker sound system. Uh no brand on the sound system. It’s fairly reasonable, but nothing crazy. Head of the driver, you’ve got a secondary display. Not a huge amount of configuration you can do here. It just gives you the critical information, which is fine. You don’t really need to be able to do too much here. Uh they have tried to double up with buttons though. So this button does your volume control, but it also navigates through this uh this menu here. So when you click it, it lights up green if you’re navigating through the menu. And then if you want volume, you’ve got to deselect it. So little bit clumsy, but um not exactly the end of the world. Then on the parking front, you’ve got front and rear parking sensors and a 360 camera. I’ll show you what that looks like. So really reasonable quality there. So there’s your reverse view, uh top down view, and then you’ve got a number of options here. So reverse tracking, this is basically a feature that uh you find on BMWs allows you to to track the path that you just took. We can go clear chassis if we want. What else have we got here? Radar alarm, whether it’s on or off. Um yeah, stack of uh little bits and pieces to choose from there. And this is what the horn sounds like. Now, let’s chat practicality. And we’ll start off with your connectivity. You’ve got wireless phone charger down here with a little cooling port. Uh, you’ve got USBA here. On the driver’s side, you have another USBA and then a 12vt outlet. There’s a USBA up here for dash cam. No USBC, which is a little bit strange. Uh, you’ve got glove box over here that’s reasonably sized. Center console that’s nice and big. Sunny’s holder. Win-win. Uh, in terms of your comfort, you’ve got dual zone automatic climate control. You have heated and cooled seats, heated steering wheel. In addition to that, your steering offers both tilt and reach adjustment. Now, in terms of the seats themselves, so electric seat adjustment, you can go forwards, backwards, back rest can go forwards and backwards. You can adjust your lumbar, you can lift the back of the seat. Unfortunately, you can’t lift the front of the seat. And in the past, that’s meant that you feel like you’re sliding out of the seat. So, when we go for a drive, I’ll see if that’s still the case. Hopefully, that is something they’ve addressed because it does make it quite uncomfortable to be seated here. Now, on the reach test though, all of this stuff is easy to reach while you’re driving. Now, second row, you’ve actually got a reasonable amount of leg room back there. Both uh knee room, toe room is great. Head room is really good as well. So, it’s a good space for kids. Uh decent space for adults as well if you need to f people around. In the boot though, you’ve got uh no underfloor storage. You have uh over 500 L of cargo space available in its standard form. Uh and then if you do drop the second row, it increases to almost 1,500 L. But it is worth keeping in mind if you go for the hybrid or the plug-in hybrid, you are robbed of a little bit of space back there with no spare tire either. Okay, we’ve just hit the road in the H6 hybrid. Uh I’ve switched off all the annoying beeping warning stuff. Uh I say this in basically every video, but this stuff does not help safety. It’s it’s so frustrating that they mandate all of the annoying chimes that just cannot be calibrated properly regardless of brand. and uh it just makes cars less safe these days. So, shame on the safety authorities. Um all right, once it is all switched off, it’s actually quite a pleasant driving experience. So, H6 hybrid is a different setup to some of the other hybrids we have on the road in this segment. This uses a 1.5 L naturally aspirated 4 cylinder petrol engine that produces 110 kW of power and 230 new m of torque on its own. and it’s different to the engine they use in the standard version of this car which is a 2 L and that also received a power bump as as part of this facelift. This is um still the same setup here for the facelifted car that’s then mated to electric motor outputs of 130 kW and 300 Nm. So the electric output is greater than the internal combustion input. So it is a big old chunk of torque that you’re getting from that electric motor and gives this a fairly dynamic driving experience. It is frontwheel drive though, so that does come with its limitations. Having a combined 179 kW and 530 Nm, that is a lot of torque to be plumbing through the front wheels of a car. We did notice when we drove the H6 GT plug-in hybrid, that it was a bit unruly when it came to sending that much torque through the wheels, even though that was all-wheel drive, it still had a big burst of torque that would go through the front axle, and it just felt a bit much. This on the other hand feels manageable and uh it’s not too bad. Even in the wet it isn’t the end of the world. Uh but just something to take note of that with those big power figures comes you know a little bit of responsibility. So how does it all feel behind the wheels? So if we give it a punch here just naturally and progressively gets up and moves and it sort of just gets up and moves quite a lot. It just keeps going. So it it doesn’t feel like it runs out of energy anytime soon. It is mated to what they call a dedicated hybrid transmission. Now, a little bit complicated, but it’s basically a two-step or twospeed transmission. And the way that it works is it allows the vehicle to run through a set of series or parallel modes and in entirely electric as well. So, at lower speeds here, you’ll actually see that EV light come on. That means the internal combustion engine is off entirely and the vehicle is running just on electrics alone. And then when you press the throttle a little bit hard up, it switches back on the internal combustion engine. It’s all very seamless. You don’t even notice when it goes between those two modes. There is a one pedal drive mode. Uh I engaged that earlier to have a bit of a play with it. It’s not amazing. Uh and it sort of pairs in with an issue here on the energy recovery levels. When it does its regen, you roll out of the throttle, it takes almost a full second for it to start actually doing regen. I think it’s too long. It needs to be doing regen as soon as you roll out of the throttle. And as a result of that, when it is in its one pedal drive mode, you roll out of the throttle. It’s only now that it starts slowing down. So I’ll I’ll give you that in real time. So ready and out of the throttle, nothing. Nothing. Now slowing down. And then back on the throttle, I’ve got nothing. And now I’ve got throttle. So it just needs to be a whole lot sharper than it is. And then it would actually make that a useful feature. On the fuel economy front, uh we’ve got a reading here of after resetting 7.7. Uh we had to do some of the faster driving earlier in the day, so it has crept up a little bit. The official figure is 5.2, so still a way off that, but I think that if you were just doing normal driving, bit of highway driving as well, you’d probably get pretty close to that, maybe around the 6 L per 100 mark, which is good for a vehicle this size. The other good thing as well is it only requires 91 ron regular unled fuel. There are some cars in this segment that require premium unled, so it means that you’re not going to have to spend extra every single time you go to the fuel bowser to fill it up. terms of the ride. Um, look, I think this could do with some work. So, the ride does feel fairly firm, and I don’t know why. I don’t know whether it’s just tire pressures or or the bigger wheels, but I just think it needs to be softened out a bit. It needs a bit of sophistication. The front end feels softer than the rear, and as a result, you find that the front can bounce around a bit while the rear is quite firm. Uh they do have a local ride and handling program kicking off where they’re actually doing local ride and handling tuning with a former uh Holden engineer who was basically the master of making those cars feel great. So hopefully this is on their attack list and they can actually improve the way this feels cuz it is just a little bit too firm for my liking at the moment. Now let’s have a look at body control. We do this on our sine waves at 130 ks an hour. It’s a maximum speed limit in Australia and it just gives us an idea of what body control is like when the speed picks up. You’re likely to encounter roads like this out in the country. All righty, there’s 130. Yeah, it’s got a bit of bounce about it. Not the end of the world, but um just a little bit of improvement could be had there. All righty, bumpy road time. We do this at 90. I’m going to have a little crack over this. See what it’s like. Actually doesn’t feel too bad. It’s surprising. The the ride is, you know, firmer, but it doesn’t feel overly firm here, which is good. We’ve got a condensed sine wave here as well. See what it’s like over this. Yeah, nice. It’s falling into all of those divots, which is good. Yeah, very good. Nice job. Let’s talk about visibility. So, I can see clearly down the front of the car there. Wing mirrors are nice and big. Visibility out the back is okay. It’s a bit of a narrow envelope, so I can’t see a great deal out of there. Not the end of the world, but it could just be a little bit bigger. On the road noise front, uh you do get a bit of tire noise coming into the cabin, especially on coarse chip roads. It’s not uh a huge amount, but it is definitely noticeable. We did put this up against our calibrated sound meter, and this is how it went. You can see how this car compares to others that we’ve tested before using the link in the description below. One thing I will touch on here that I had issues with in in the pre-update H6 and I’m finding here as well is the seating position. I just feel like I’m sliding out of this seat constantly. It really is quite uncomfortable and I just can’t find a nice way to be seated in here cuz you can’t lift the front of the seat. As a result of that, you just constantly feel like you’re sliding out of it. Same with this steering wheel. feels like it’s it’s angled forward and it kind of just sits in this part of your palm and it’s just not overly comfortable to hold onto. They have added a bit more bolster to this wheel, but um I just can’t find a decent sort of driving position here with the wheel unfortunately. Terms of drive modes, you’ve got eco, normal, sport, and snow. Going to pop this into sport mode. Go for a lap of with the sound effect lap of the track here to see what it feels like. It gets up and moves. It’s doesn’t hang about, that’s for sure. Uh we test all cars back to back in the same way just to see um how they perform closer to their limits. Yeah. So, it’s doing the same sort of thing that we had in the H6 uh plug-in hybrid where it just flares up those wheels with a bit too much torque. just needs a little bit more sophistication there. But once it’s moving, it is moving. You can feel that twospeed sort of switching between gears as it goes. And I just cannot stand this steering wheel. It’s just so hard to hold on to when the speed picks up. Uh but having said that, this um is moving along really nicely. It’s far sportier than it uh than it deserves to be. Brake pedal feels good as well. Now, there you go. It’s actually pretty fun to drive. Um, yeah, this hybrid system is great. It has a lot of punch, especially for a front-wheel drive car. Like, it is absolutely hoofing along. There you go. Nice job, H. Okay, so time to test our lane support systems. Uh, we’ll see whether any of this stuff has improved. So, we do that at 70 ks an hour. So, just flick that on. Adaptive cruise control activated. Please stay focused. Okay. Okay, that is on. Wait for the steering wheel to go green. Intelligent cruise activated. There we go. All right, so doing a decent job here in the first lane. Jump over to the next lane. There we go. Nice. Doing a decent job here as well. So, this appears to have been improved cuz I remember last time this wasn’t really all that impressive. So, try the outermost lane. See if it has any luck up here. Okay, waiting for that. All right, it’s gone green. So, it’s gone down towards the line there, but brought itself back up. It is pretty close to that line. eventually fixes itself. But, um, yeah, definitely a pass in the first two lanes and sort of a questionable pass there in the third lane. Okay, time to do a little bit of acceleration testing. Uh, we’re going to go zero all the way through to 120 so we can get our 80 to 120 time as well. This actually has launch control. So, to activate that, you put it into sport mode. You have to switch stability control off and then brake and throttle at the same time. Comes up saying launch control activated. [Music] There you go. Nice and strong off the line there. Uh, grabbed it. Second gear there. There’s 100 and 120. That feels quick. If you compare it to something like a RAV 4, this feels much faster off the line there. So, 0 to 100, 8.02 seconds. So, not a bad time. uh 80 to 120 4.98 seconds. So that’s pretty good as well. That is the the sort of overtaking time when you when you’re up and moving already. So uh both sort of fairly healthy figures there. Um go back and do a stop from 100. See what the brake and tire package is like. Okay. [Music] Felt like it took a long time to stop. Um let’s have a look at the numbers. Wow. So 3.31 seconds and 43.17 m. That is not very good. So anything between 35 and 40 is good. 43 m is a long stopping distance in the dry. Uh I might give that one more crack just to see if it does the exact same thing. Uh because yeah, not very impressive. Okay, that felt marginally better. Let’s just see what that looks like. Nope, not much better at all. So, 3.21 seconds, 42.57 m. So, yeah, that is a long stopping distance for uh family SUV like this. So, not very impressive. Now, how quickly does it go in reverse? Let’s find out. [Music] Okay. 54 km an hour. So H6, what do we think? Look, the design update I think is good. Tech update is great as well. They have dropped the ball though on stuff like this seating position and the steering. I just think it’s stuff that should be easy enough to fix that they need to get on to because it kind of just ruins the rest of the package. The rest of the package is actually pretty decent. So if you are going to buy one of these, take one for a test drive first. Make sure you take it home. go for a bit of an extended drive as well and make sure that you’re comfortable with this seating position, too. You might find it fine. Uh I just find it really frustrating to deal with. Um but outside of that, it is actually exceptional value for money, pretty fuel efficient for what it is, and uh has heaps of space inside for the family. So, let me know what you reckon in the comments section below. Uh if you did enjoy the video, make sure you share it with your mates. Uh make sure you subscribe as well if you haven’t yet. But until next time, take it
Haval has updated the H6 from both a styling and tech point of view. There’s also more power for non-hybrid versions. Paul Maric gets behind the wheel to see what it’s like and if they’ve sold the one major gripe he had with the pre-facelift version.
Hardness tester, noise and lane keeping results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/121Auf6HGvaBqRToYcuAz94alin7Sw55SpOPECBDlnKE
Skip Ahead:
Intro: 00:00
Exterior: 00:50
Interior: 01:56
Infotainment: 03:09
Practicality: 06:14
On the Road: 07:48
Self driving tech: 16:02
Accel. & braking: 17:20
Verdict: 19:35
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