Changan Deepal S05 review

Changan hasn’t yet earned the same success of some of the other Chinese brands to enter the UK. But the Deepal S05 could be the car to change its fortunes – especially now you can choose between a fully electric or plug-in-hybrid version.

One of China’s oldest car manufacturers, Changan has actually had an engineering presence in the UK since 2010 – although you’ve only been able to buy its cars here since September 2025.

We weren’t blown away by the Deepal S07 – the larger of the two cars currently available – so we were pleasantly surprised to find that the slightly smaller Deepal S05 is noticeably improved. In terms of the driving experience and the driver assistance systems, the S05 feels much more attuned to what UK buyers want. The introduction of the S05 Ultra PHEV should prove popular as well; the majority of the recent growth in PHEV sales is down to Chinese models such as the Chery Tiggo 8, Jaecoo 7 and Geely Starray.

At £37,990, the electric S05 might not immediately strike you as good value. But it’s on a par with mid-to-high spec versions of the Kia EV3, Skoda Elroq and Renault Scenic (with electric car grants included), and cheaper than the BYD Atto 3 and Peugeot e-3008. Of its Chinese rivals, only the Leapmotor B10 stands out as being worth considering for its price, space and range.

The PHEV starts at an eye-catching £32,990, although you probably want the Max trim (£2,000 extra) for its head-up display, heated steering wheel, heated and cooled front seats and wireless phone charging. These listed features all come as standard on the electric model, which doesn't offer a choice of trim levels. This strategy of bundling everything in will be attractive to many people but, if you can do without a lot of these features, you might want to consider a cheaper electric SUV instead.

There are five paint colours and two interior colours for the S05. The only other options are a glass roof and a detachable tow bar, with every S05 able to tow 1,600kg.

Many of these new Chinese SUVs look quite bland, but the Italian-designed S05 has some details that stand out. There are beady, high-set daytime running lights plus a strong leading edge at the front end, and a crystal-like third brake light at the back. You'll spot an etching of the Chongqing skyline on the windscreen. The wheels are 20-inchers as standard, with alloys hiding behind the eye-catching aero covers that add nine miles to the range figure. Its squat shape and flowing lines put us in mind of the Mazda CX-30.

The Mazda comparison isn't unfounded – Changan manufactures the Mazda 6e and Mazda CX-6e, and also donates its platform.

Changan seems to have covered the more practical elements of car buying, too. The S05 is a safe car, scoring five stars in its Euro NCAP crash tests. There’s a seven-year warranty (eight years for the battery), and up to three years of RAC roadside assistance. We’re told that there’s a fully stocked parts warehouse next to East Midlands Airport, and two more in continental Europe.

There’s the usual interior layout we’ve seen from Chinese cars: a massive touchscreen and a tray for two phones and little else. But the S05’s interior is quite welcoming, thanks to plush-feeling seats in vegan upholstery, wood-ish trim on the centre console and contrast stitching throughout the cabin. The frameless doors give a premium first impression.

High-spec cars also feature what Changan calls the 'Queen seat' for the front passenger, where you can enjoy a footrest and a reclined seatback – perfect if your passenger has a habit of sleeping on long drives. However, some of S05's rivals that include a similar feature typically also include seat massaging, and the passenger seat still doesn't have height adjustment.

While the phone tray surround feels cheap, the rest of the cabin is decent enough quality – it’s more than a match for the Elroq, Atto 3 and EV3. And you can get a Trumpish bright orange interior (for no extra cost) if you’re feeling brave.

A head-up display is standard (except on the entry-level PHEV), and you can get it to show your speed, remaining range, driver assistance and sat nav info – including a rather distracting map when you’re trying to get across a junction. Thankfully, this can be scaled back to your preferences or turned off entirely via the touchscreen. Ideally, the HUD would display directions when you're using Apple CarPlay/Android Auto – at the moment it only works with the native nav software.

You’ll need the head-up display if your passenger has claimed the screen. Deepal’s party trick is that the screen can rotate to face the driver or passenger (or sit somewhere in between). It can swivel automatically when only one seat is occupied. This swivel function will suit you if you’re happy to get on with driving and let your partner/teenager change the music or fiddle with the colour of the car displayed on screen. Or it means you can get your passenger to sort the sat nav.

A lot of the screen is configurable – such as the swipe-down menu for key functions and the always-there bar of shortcuts at the bottom of the screen. The idea is that you spend a bit of time setting the car up to how you like it, and then leave the submenus alone. It’s very similar to how you can arrange your desired shortcuts on an iPhone control menu. We would absolutely recommend putting the fog light switch in the top menu – you don’t want to be desperately searching through lots of sub-menus when it’s pea soup outside.

The touchscreen runs a Qualcomm processor so it (mostly) responds instantly, the graphics are crisp and it’s absolutely stuffed full of features. Some of these are useful, such as having the map as the home screen like a Tesla, but others are very curious. In the DAB menu, there’s the option to turn on emergency alerts for war or ‘nuclear fallout’. There’s also an external speaker which can invite pedestrians to cross the road ahead of you or tell other drivers to get off their phones. We can’t imagine distracted drivers will be happy to be told off by another car…

With so much to display on one screen, it’s not surprising that the top menu is a busy cluster of small icons – some of which are buttons but many aren’t. The DAB radio reception was patchy in our test car, although the standard-fit stereo system with multiple sound modes is exceptional, even if some of the modes can make a podcast sound odd. And, however good the touchscreen is, the S05 would be easier to use if it came with more buttons.

There is a voice control system, which wakes up when you say ‘hi Deepal’, but it’s fairly limited in what it can do and what it understands.

The S05 is longer than its main rivals, and that boosts practicality. With the front passenger seat pushed back as far as it would go, we couldn’t touch the firewall and there was still plenty of legroom for a rear-seat passenger. The floor is flat and the three sets of Isofix points are easily accessible.

Our test car had the optional panoramic glass roof, which doesn’t open but it does make the cabin feel light and airy. However, it could do with some opacity controls because it’s too much in direct sunlight, and it cuts into rear headroom – which is merely fine as a result.

Rear-seat passengers get a fold-down centre armrest with cupholders, plus seatback pockets, lights and USB sockets. The hinged Deepal panel on the back of the front armrest, which is probably a tablet holder, looks cheap and breakable.

Up front, there’s plenty of storage space – even though there’s no glovebox. The door bins are big and useful, there’s a partly covered shelf area under the cupholders and phone trays, and the centre armrest hides an exceptionally deep cubby that’s cooled and has a removable tray.

The 492-litre boot in the S05 EV is a bit bigger than the likes of the Elroq, EV3 and Jaecoo E5, and a small-ish load lip means it shouldn’t be too tricky to load heavy items. Impressively, the rear seats fold completely flat.

There’s a 12V socket and a light, and there’s extra space under the boot floor that’s ideal for cables. A couple of hooks would make the space a bit more useful, however, and there’s very little space above the parcel shelf for when you need to load to the roof.

The electric S05 has a trick up its sleeve: a massive 159-litre frunk under the bonnet that’s big enough for a suitcase or a pushchair, which makes up for the coupe-like roofline cutting into loadspace.

Meanwhile, the S05 PHEV doesn't get the frunk because there's an engine to package. To compensate, the boot space stands at 552 litres, with an extra 60 litres under the boot floor. The boot space is quite shallow, though, and the underfloor storage is at the back of the boot, so it's tricky to access.

The Deepal S05 launched as a fully electric car, although a plug-in hybrid has now been added to the lineup. As we expected, the S05 Ultra PHEV prioritises the electric power, and the engine can be used just as a generator. We'll go into more detail below.

Back to the electric S05, which is rear-wheel drive in its standard configuration. It packs a 268hp motor and a 0-62mph time of 7.5 seconds – although it feels a bit quicker than this in reality. Or, for £2,000 extra, you can upgrade to the all-wheel-drive version, which adds a motor to the front axle and drops the 0-62mph time down by two seconds. This AWD model also includes a 'snow' driving mode.

As is often the case, the rear-wheel-drive variant is the most efficient. The S05 promises 303 miles of range from its 68.8kWh battery, compared with 278 miles for the AWD model. That splits the range figures of the two battery sizes of the Elroq and EV3. When we finished our test drive, the rear-driven S05 was showing 66% charge and 200 miles of range, suggesting that Changan’s range estimate is achievable in real-world driving.

The S05 sports 200kW of charging power, allowing you to recoup 10-80% in an impressive 23 minutes. That’s about twice as quick as the bigger Deepal S07, which uses a different battery chemistry to the S05. It’s also a bit quicker than the Elroq and EV3 manage. The charging port is on the rear right wing, while the charge indicator is the odd little circle detail on the left-hand window.

Plug-in-hybrid S05s come with an 18.4kWh battery and a 62-mile electric range. With the petrol tank and the battery brimmed, you can drive for up to 648 miles, Changan says. The PHEV can fast-charge at 55kW – which will only add around 30 miles in 15 minutes, so is almost pointless unless you can charge cheaply – and offers AC charging at 11kW.

The electric motor solely powers the wheels in most circumstances. When full power is required above 60mph or so, the engine can join in and power the wheels as well, but most of the time the engine is either off or deployed as a generator to power the e-motor or charge the battery.

As you'd expect, the EV mode runs on electric power as much as possible, while the Hybrid Auto mode also favours the electric motor until a low state of charge, when the engine joins in to maintain that level of battery percentage. The Hybrid Manual mode is your 'save the battery for later' mode, which would be useful if you're doing a long motorway journey with urban driving at the end, for example.

Additionally, there's a Stationary Self-Charge mode, where the engine is used as a generator to recharge the battery when the car is parked up, and a dramatically titled Emergency Mode. This can be toggled on when both your fuel and charge levels are low, cutting consumables like the air conditioning system to claw back a couple of extra miles that might be enough to get you to a charging station or petrol forecourt. We'd hope that most drivers would never let both power sources get low enough to need it.

First impressions behind the wheel are good. The S05 has slightly heavier, more natural feeling steering than many overly assisted SUVs. Performance is eager, helped by a snappy throttle response, and it’s easy to drive around town.

On the motorway, the S05 is hushed and rides decently. There’s a bit of tyre noise but it’s not intrusive and, while it doesn’t offer a ‘magic carpet’ ride, it’s good enough to compete with European and Korean rivals. You’ll typically hear the suspension thunk into bumps more than you’ll feel it.

The steering is also quite quick, which makes the S05 feel agile for its size. But, on a faster road, the S05’s alert responses aren’t totally matched by the body, so it can start to feel a bit tippy and uncontrolled.

On bumpy country lanes, it’d be wise not to push the electric S05’s limits. Here, the suspension doesn’t feel so placid, and we felt like we were on a mechanical bull as the S05 bucked and yawed over difficult road surfaces. Considering the power is available instantly and there’s a lot of it, it can soon feel like you’re going too fast for the road.

The S05 EV’s power delivery threw up another surprise in tight corners. If you’re too heavy with the throttle, the S05’s rear end starts to slide out and you might get a pinch of yobbish tyre squeal. This was in Comfort mode with the traction control on. You don’t feel in danger because the traction control swiftly steps in, but it’s a bit alarming when it happens the first time. This is also unusual for an electric car where the power can be metered out exactly – the sensible Skoda Elroq would never break traction like this.

Unlike the Elroq, the S05 actually feels rear-wheel drive – you can feel you’re being pushed out of a corner. Combined with the well-weighted steering, the S05 is quite satisfying to drive on the right road.

In comparison, the S05 PHEV is front-wheel drive. It feels like the traction control is better integrated here (maybe the software has been tweaked in an over-the-air update), and it'll barely wheelspin even on slippery surfaces. When the engine is on, it's typically very quiet, and sounds like ambient noise.

The brake pedal is firm at the top end, not mushy like some EVs, and the brakes themselves are strong. Stamp on the stop pedal and the S05 quickly comes to a halt, setting off the hazard lights and saving an ‘emergency’ video to the car’s computer storage.

The regenerative braking, however, is less successful. You can only adjust it by diving into the touchscreen and fiddling with the ‘Custom’ driving mode. Even though there’s a sliding scale to play with, the highest regen setting doesn’t offer the one-pedal driving you’d get in the best EVs. The regen generally feels a bit unnatural, and you can never quite know how quickly it’ll slow you down.

While most of the driver aids are quite well behaved – unlike in the S07 which loudly told us off as soon as we nudged over the speed limit – you do have to use the touchscreen a lot. This can be distracting on the motorway, making you look away from the road for a long time. You’ll probably want to keep the lane assist on if you’re messing about with the screen while driving.

Visibility out the back could be better, with the coupe-ish styling creating big blind spots – just like many rivals. But, unusually, the seat headrests block over-the-shoulder visibility, so you might end up relying on the standard-fit blind-spot monitoring system – which is shown in the mirror and in the heads-up display.