Test Drive Impressions: Deepal S07 Italian Designed Quirky Chinese EV SUV

The new Deepal S07 is yet a new Italian designed, Chinese manufactured electric midsize SUV imported into Australia by it's manufacturer Changan.

Priced at $58,521 driveaway in NSW, the car has a launch special offering complimentary 12 Month charge offer for Evie public chargers for all Deepal S07's sold and delivered by 31 March 2025.

The Evie charging offer subscription commences from date of first registration and excludes fleet, government, rental buyers as well as vehicles used for commercial purposes, including rideshare, taxi, VHA and couriers.

Image by - Neerav Bhatt

Yet another electric SUV you say, aren't they all the same? No this one is kind of quirky and different.

In some ways it's quirky good and other ways quirky annoying.

One way this car is a bit quirky annoying starts with the key . It's really smooth and slippery.

During the week I had the car on media review loan I heard from another Deepal S07 driver who found the key fob literally slid out of their pocket and got left behind, as there's no way to attach any kind of key ring to it.

One way this car is quirky in a good way is that you can actually rotate the central screen either to the right, to the left or to the middle at a different angle altogether if it suits you.

Or you can also just to let it decide which way to move for itself by detecting whether there's someone sitting in just the driver's seat or the passenger seat.

Home charging speed for the Deepal S07 is perfectly fine and on slower City DC fast Chargers up to 100 KW or less it's also fine but if you're hoping to use this car for highway trips I would think again.

It's just too slow charging for highway driving, your family will have to wait a long time and they'll get really frustrated.

The top charging rate of this car 92kW is just not good enough for this price point for 2025. This is the case for quite a few mid size electric SUVs which support well under 100kW DC charging rate at peak.

In my opinion as a seasoned EV road tripper across Australia, an electric car used for long drives needs to have a peak charging rate of around 140-150kW minimum.

There's plenty of boot space with 445L standard and 1385 L with the back seats down. I could easily fit in my weekly shopping as well as my shopping trolley because the width is substantial.

I could have easily fitted in four large cubes of mulch during my trip to Bunnings. There's a Frank at the front with a large capacity of 125L.

Don't stress about the quirky feature where the Deepal S07 greets you loudly upon opening the door eg "My name is Deepal you can call me anytime and anywhere" because you can turn this off from the central menu and it will stay off forever.

The Deepal s07 has a built in 4-way view dash cam which is a great feature I think all electric cars should have. Unfortunately this is something you have to turn it on every time you start the car and you also can't use it to record in Sentry mode while the car is off like Tesla. Recordings can be saved to USB stick.

Chinese cars have developed so fast, they usually have a really fast processor, lots of memory, storage etc this all enables great features like being able to look through your car and see what's around easily with smooth fluid 360 video.

Overall the Deepal S07 is a quirky but well equipped electric SUV that is pleasant to drive, with some colourful paint colour options not just black, white and grey.

However it is struggling to sell in great numbers so far as the brand is totally new to Australia and this EV is competing for attention with so many other electric and ICE mid size SUV's.

According to prospective EV buyers I've chatted with some were also put off by the Deepal SO7 requiring quite frequent service intervals of 10,000km or 12 months to maintain warranty coverage.

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