Changan Deepal S07 review

The cabin is well-finished but pretty generic. Still, you'll buy only one new car this year, so it doesn't matter to you that it's like so many others. You can at least liven things up by opting, at no cost, for white or brown-orange fake leather, a diversion from the usual black.

Tall drivers might want the driver's seat to go closer to the floor, but on the other hand that gives good foot space behind. Anyway it's comfy and supportive, and electrically adjustable, heated and vented. Out the back, legroom is plentiful. Rear passengers also get power sockets and their own climate control.

The boot has a big floor area. It's not that deep and there's no hidden storage under its floor, so the total is 510 litres. But there is a useful 125 litre froot, so if your baggage divides that's fine. The centre console holds a reasonable amount of general whatever – food, drink, games – but it can slide off in corners.

Speakers in the headrest improve stereo sound for the driver, and also mean navigation instructions and the verbose safety warnings are sweet-nothinged into their ears only.

Fortunately this isn't one of those Tesla-type cars with no driver display, even if that's how it looks. Your instruments take the form of a helpful HUD, showing speed, navigation, battery state, driver assist and more. The navigation voice has the same Chinese accent as the speed limit overlord.

But there are almost no hardware buttons. That means a lot of screen diving. Want to adjust the direction of the face-level vents? That's several swipes away. Et cetetra. OK you can set up shortcuts for some of your frequent asks, but even then it means swiping the shortcut screen, hitting the relevant icon, then dismissing the screen. There is a voice-activated assistant, of course, claimed to be 'intelligent' but really stretching the definition of that word.

Meanwhile a lot of display area is wasted by a wallpaper image and can't be tiled. You can't display music track or consumption info if you have any kind of map up. So you'll probably end up wirelessly mirroring your phone.