Best plug-in hybrid? Skoda vs Mercedes, Chery and more

The MG is a 4.7m-long, five-seat, mid-sized family SUV with a near-300-horsepower plug-in hybrid powertrain promising 75 electric miles. You would expect to pay a European car maker between £40,000 and £45,000 for such a car but the MG starts from about £32,000. And the Chery? It's even bigger - an alternative to a full-sized, seven-seat, plug-in hybrid family SUV like a Mazda CX-80 (£50,000) or Hyundai Santa Fe (£53,000).

But it's priced from £43,000. However, value to real buyers can be a little more complicated than a comparison of showroom list prices might suggest. Someone who didn't need the Tiggo 9's third-row seats, for example, would find a boot almost as large in the Skoda Kodiaq iV, and seating configurability almost as clever.

And all in a car available in a comparable equipment level, after a typical deposit and on a four-year monthly finance PCP deal, for around £550 a month. (What the Skoda gives up to the Chery on showroom price it can compensate for on finance contribution and residual value.)

Practicality next

These five cars operate in different niches of the SUV firmament. We needn't waste time pointing out that the bigger ones have more room in them than the smaller ones. But we can certainly credit well-packaged family cars and point the finger at poorer ones. When Mercedes introduced the second-generation GLC in 2022, big hybrid drive batteries like the GLC 300e's (only the Chery's is bigger) tended to exact a packaging cost.

You find it when you open the Merc's boot and spy a load-bay floor bowed upwards by about three inches, as if some volcanic laccolith was lurking underneath. The available loading area is a bit shallow (400 litres in volume up to the seatbacks) and its floor uneven as a result. In terms of passenger space, the GLC ought to offer more. Its second row is only marginally more spacious than the Cupra's.

Where the Spanish-made PHEV pleasantly surprises you with its adult-appropriate second-row quarters, the German-made luxury operator leaves you feeling a little short-changed.

The Skoda scores predictably well (comfortable front seats; sliding and reclining back ones; lots of space everywhere, including a vast boot) but the MG is surprisingly comparable in how much space it offers in row two, if not quite in the boot or up front. The Chery underwhelms a little for passenger comfort, mainly because it feels like it's squeezing a lot in - such as those folded seats in the boot floor, where there might otherwise be more room for bags.

Nicely upholstered as they are, the Tiggo's seats just aren't quite a match for the Kodiaq's for comfort or adjustability and cranking the second-row ones forwards to get access to row three is made hard by a truculent and difficult mechanism. There's an attention to everyday functional detail apparent in the Czech car that's notable by its absence in the Chinese one.

The truth about efficiency

The real-world economy of PHEVs has always had bad press. For some reason, it tends to be judged on behalf of someone who won't set out to use their car as its maker intended. To argue that cars with parallel powertrains are a bad idea is one thing. To seek to back up that argument by pointing out that such a car will turn out to be less economical than one with only a single source of power when it's driven in a way that makes one of its powertrains mostly redundant is beyond simplistic.

It's downright unfair. It's time for the PHEV to earn some respect, clearly. So does the current crop deliver what is promised, in terms of both electric range and engine-on efficiency? We had a wintry test day on which to take a view - and were, broadly speaking, quite impressed. The edited highlights (see the table above) are that the car with the longest official claimed electric range did indeed turn out to have the greatest electric test autonomy: the Chery Tiggo 9.

But the Chery also undershot its lab test electric mileage claim by the biggest margin, while the car that did this by the smallest margin - and also hit the second-longest EV test range - was the MG.

What both demonstrate is the folly of assuming that spending more will get you a PHEV with longer electric legs and better efficiency. On that score, the £64k Mercedes GLC 300e - which claims the second-longest electric range here, but was also the heaviest car on test-only avoided posting the shortest all-electric test range by a whisker. It was, by some distance, the least efficient car on test in 'range-extended' - or engine-on - running.

Because after verifying real-world electric range on a fairly short test loop made up of a variety of what we might call 'off-motorway' roads, we verified hybrid-mode efficiency over the same test loop, taking figures from each car's trip computer. The results followed expectations fairly closely. The Cupra Formentor (the smallest, lightest car on test) went best, returning almost 50mpg, with most of the rest falling in behind it pretty closely, roughly where you would expect them to.

But the Mercedes fell almost 50% short of the Cupra's mark, returning a decidedly poor 33.0mpg. There was one other notable villain of our range and efficiency exercise. Despite posting the longest electric test range and backing it up with creditable range-extended efficiency, the Chery Tiggo 9 left us with a sour taste. Its problem was one of simple reporting: software calibration, to put it another way. 

PHEVs, like EVs, need to keep a portion of their drive battery capacity in reserve in order that there's enough remaining voltage in the electric part of the car's hybrid system that it can continue to function. This is normal.

But where all of the other PHEVs we tested effectively metered their electric range over usable battery capacity - showing you only those remaining electric miles that you can actually access - the Chery's electric range gauge seemed to span the whole of nominal capacity, advertising more electric range than it would actually deliver. Unlike every other car on test, then, it defaulted to hybrid mode with about 18% battery charge and around 15 miles still showing.

This was simply an indication of the part of the car's reserve battery capacity that other PHEVs keep hidden. But if they're not usable miles, clearly the car shouldn't be indicating them at all. It's a bit of creative accounting that undermines your trust- and the Tiggo 9 could do without it.

The driver's choice

When it comes to the driving experience, the Chery ought to stroll this part of the exercise. It is the only PHEV with two electric motors here. (The Mercedes offers all-wheel drive, but of the old-school mechanical sort.) Those motors, working in tandem with its turbocharged 1.5-litre combustion engine, give the Tiggo 9 almost 40% more peak power than the next most powerful car here.

Even in cases where they offer Audi RS3-trumping power, though, you don't particularly expect these cars to deliver driver appeal. Big family cars should be comfortable, usable, refined, easy to operate and dynamically versatile to satisfy their primary purpose. That all of these cars tick at least two of those boxes shows that, broadly speaking, the plug-in hybrid family car is in decent dynamic fettle.

And - in this company certainly, just as it would elsewhere, I suspect - the Cupra carves out its sporty selling point quite clearly. It does feel revvier, tauter-riding, more energetic and more interesting to pedal keenly than anything else. That, incidentally, is thanks not least to some 'piped-in' digital imitation engine noise that sounds a lot like a five-cylinder engine.

The Chery's biggest dynamic trick, meanwhile, is that it really does feel like driving something fully electric. Where the Skoda and Cupra feel like they're limited to about 60% throttle when in EV mode - enough to get about, clearly, but at times a little like the car's only half awake - the Chery has loads of instant motor torque and quiet, assured performance.

The MG and Mercedes do slightly better EV impressions than the VW Group cars - the MG because it has more electric motor power and the Mercedes because it is the only car here with paddle-shift motor regen control, which just tricks you into believing that you've got some all-electric multi-speed gearbox to work with. All of the cars have either acceptable or good ride comfort and refinement.

The Skoda and Chery top that pile with the gentlest ride and the quietest combustion engine respectively, and the Mercedes props it up with the noisiest engine and the clunkiest ride (alloy wheels other than our test car's 20in items are available). What actually separates the good from the bad on the road, then - and what a telling sign of our times this is- are the particular ADAS functions with which these cars are burdened... sorry, fitted.

The Skoda and the Cupra get top marks here. Neither car has particularly irksome lane keeping, speed limit adherence or driver monitoring systems anyway, but both come with a simple physical button on the steering spoke that allows you to toggle the key systems off within the space of a few seconds without taking your hands off the wheel and without any interaction with the infotainment screen. The Mercedes comes a close third.

You do have to interact with the central screen at every restart to disable those systems you don't like, but that doesn't take long. And if you forget, the tuning of those systems is far from awful. The MG HS's ADAS features are more bothersome when left on and finding the corners of the infotainment system where those systems are switched off is more distracting.

It's worth noting that our car didn't have the latest MG Pilot Custom user-configurable ADAS setting of other MG models, which makes it all considerably easier. The 2026-model-year HSs, coming soon, will get this. Which leaves the Tiggo 9's ADAS features and, frankly, they are a mess.

Leaving them active makes it bleep and bong at you in four different ways (for lane departure, speeding warning, speed limit change and driver monitoring alert) - and enough, at times, to leave you feeling totally bombarded. Really? You're worried I might be distracted? How strange.

To prevent it all requires a multi-layered dive into the car's infotainment system (Chery's shortcut menu gives access to one of only four systems you'll want to disable) - and it is a process I timed taking about 40 seconds in all, during which your attention needs to be pretty singularly focused on the infotainment system.

It's not something to do while you're driving, needless to say. In the Skoda, achieving the same thing takes less than five seconds and, thanks to the physical buttons, you can manage it while only glancing down from the road.

The final reckoning

Autocar group tests typically concern themselves with more exciting, appetite-whetting things than how often new cars tend to alert and irritate you, and how easy it is to prevent them from doing so. But this is a test of everyday-use family cars in 2026, when good ADAS integration, in this tester's view, probably makes the decisive difference on how drivable so many new cars actually are. Let's consider the territory in which we find ourselves.

Right now, car manufacturers are fitting lane keeping, speed limit reminding and driver monitoring systems that they know most users don't want, because they are legally required to. Both the Skoda and Cupra seem built by brands that understand the truth of where we are, as defined in those terms. Mercedes too - although perhaps not quite so instinctively. As for MG and Chery, the first is catching on, albeit slowly, but the second still has an awful lot of learning to do.

The Tiggo 9's is a crop of ADAS features so persistently intrusive and inaccessible to disable that I wouldn't choose to live with them even for 800 horsepower and 150 miles of electric range. The Chery avoids the ignominy of last place, however, because there's a car that costs 50% more than it, and that fails to match it in so many meaningful ways (efficiency, electric range, performance, refinement).

So it's the wooden spoon for the Mercedes GLC 300e, and fourth place for- and some serious reservations about - the Tiggo 9. The Cupra gets an honourable mention, in third, for proving PHEVs can be at once reasonably practical and interesting to drive, as well as having enough electric range to dramatically cut your fuel bills.

And our winner? It was pushed all the way by the surprisingly strong MG HS, which has electric range, space, drivability, efficiency and good driving manners well beyond what you would expect, for a seriously attractive price.

But it's the Skoda Kodiaq - with its clever, spacious interior, its physical switchgear and its quiet, competent, comfortable and undistracting character - that would slide into your everyday life and make it unquestionably better. If there's something that just works about the plug-in hybrid as the modern family car, then the Kodiaq will probably just work better than any other.

1st: Skoda Kodiaq

Spacious, comfortable, functional and easy to use, the Kodiaq could be the antidote to everything annoying about modern cars. Unremarkable to drive in the best possible way.

2nd: MG HS

The HS brings really impressive practicality and electric range, and pleasant driving manners, for a bargain price that pulls the rug out from under its pricier rivals.