Jaecoo J8 vs Maserati Ghibli

What's the difference?

It is hard to argue with the sheer amount of stuff you get in the J8 for the price. And that long warranty and capped price servicing program remove the stress of buying into a new brand.

The J8 might be more car than most people need due to its size and lack of third row seating.

It’s okay to drive but isn’t class leading and no hybrid option will count it out for the ever increasing number of Aussies looking to petrol-electric power.

The J8 is a solid machine and well worth a look if you are after glitz and glamour on a budget.

Note: CarsGuide attended this event as a guest of the manufacturer, with meals provided.

The Maserati Trofeo Ghibli is a very strange beast, but there's no doubt that it is a beast. Fast, loud and capable on a race track, and yet still closely resembling a classy, expensive Italian family sedan, it is genuinely unique. And genuinely strange, in a good way.

The J8 looks familiar but it's hard to remember where you’ve seen it before. There are shades of Mazda, Mercedes-Benz and Range Rover scattered throughout.

The J8 looks more native Jaecoo than the smaller J7, but either way it's a handsome machine in the metal.

Its large, prominent front grille with thick vertical slats gives it presence on the road. This is paired with a big JAECOO badge on the grille and dynamic LED headlights and DRLs.

It has a sleek side profile and does away with gaudy panel creases and sharp edges, which helps project its premium persona. This design is highlighted by its hidden door handles, well integrated roof rails and rear spoiler.

There is a rear light bar, which is the current must have styling item, and connects the tail-lights

Inside is where the action is.

It looks proper luxe, with soft touch and textured inserts all over. We spent the majority of our time in the Ridge AWD and on top of the dash is a type of soft synthetic suede and there are wood veneer-type inserts that give it a touch of class as well as some piano black highlights and plenty of premium feeling materials.

Even in the back seat, where some brands can cut costs, the J8 has a quality feel to it.

It is an impressive space for circa-$50,000.

The Ghibli Trofeo is an alluringly beautiful car from just about every angle, with a genuine sense of occasion and presence about its nose, a sleek side profile and a much improved rear end, where the light clusters have been redesigned.

The Trofeo special touches are impossible to miss, particularly from the driver’s seat where you look straight into two vast nostrils on the bonnet. There are also carbon fibre pieces on the front air duct and the rear extractor for a sportier, wilder look.

The red details on the air vents on each side are the highlight, though, while the lightning bolt on the Maserati trident badge is another nice touch.

The interior is simply beyond special and feels even more expensive than it is. Overall, I’d say it again, it’’s alluring. Italian style at its best and the Ghibli is the Cinderella point in the range, because the Quattroporte big brother really is too large, and the Levante is an SUV.

Having only five seats in a car this big feels like a waste of space, and in reality it is. You’re now driving a very big and bulky car without the people carrying pros.

Very rarely will you need to use the giant 738-litre boot, but the ability to carry children’s friends or extended family is probably a more useful and regular scenario.

Up front there are plenty of storage options with lots of nooks and crannies in the centre console, including a sizeable and deep bin and good size pockets on the doors. Cupholders for both rows are a plus, too.

USB charging points for both rows are great. If you like to connect to Apple CarPlay via a cord and not wirelessly the port is down near the front seat passengers right foot, which is hard to access.

Additionally the wireless device charger is on the passenger side of the console. Both are hallmarks of a car originally designed to be driven on the other side of the road.

The back seat is huge, there is ample leg, shoulder and head room and it can easily accommodate adults or large teenagers.

From the driver’s seat, the Trofeo Ghibli feels spacious indeed, and while it’s not as vast in the back as a Quattroporte, there’s plenty of room for two adults, or even three small children.

The move to throw sportiness at the Ghibli has led to it having firm but fabulous seats. They’re comfortable, and the leather is luscious, but the actual seat back is constantly letting your spine know that this is no ordinary Ghibli. 

Throw it around a track, though, and the seats feel just right, providing the kind of support you need.

Boot space is ample at 500 litres and the Ghibli feels like the sort of car you could take your family in, if only it didn’t make you feel like you were spoiling your children too much.

At a price of $265,000, the idea of “value” becomes a different discussion, but you only need to glance at the Ghibli to realise that it looks like four times that much money.

The interior is also spectacularly boudoir-like, with lashings of carbon fibre and a whole cattle stud worth of full-grain Pieno Fiore natural leather, “the best the world has ever seen”, as Maserati likes to say.

Perhaps most vitally, this Trofeo racy edition gets a Ferrari engine; a 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 good for 433kW and 730Nm (the first time it’s been seen in the Ghibli), driving the rear wheels only through a limited-slip differential and an eight-speed torque converter automatic gearbox. You also get very nice, expensive feeling paddles to shift those gears with.

Speaking of nice, the 21-inch aluminium Orione wheels are dead classy, if reminiscent of Alfa Romeo cars.

Ghibli Trofeo models come with a Corsa, or Race, button for hard-core sporty driving, and a Launch Control function.

There’s also an MIA (Maserati Intelligent Assistant), featuring a rather large 10.1-inch multimedia screen with upgraded resolution.

The Active Driving Assist “assisted driving function”, which has been seen in Ghibli before, can now be activated on urban roads and ordinary highways.

Power comes from a 2.0-litre, four-cylinder, turbo-petrol engine that makes 183kW and 385Nm, which is matched to an eight-speed automatic driving either the front or all four wheels.

That’s a decent amount of grunt and is on par with a Volkswagen Golf GTI, but the J8 weights about 1800kg in 2WD guise with AWD adding 100kg.

Those numbers are also short of the 206kW/422Nm delivered by the Santa Fe’s turbo-petrol motor but are better than the 200kW and 333Nm made by the Sorento’s non-turbo V6.

The lack of a hybrid option at launch, which is popular in rival machines, could prove to be a misstep.

Jaecoo said a plug-in hybrid version was under consideration, but is likely to come at a decent premium.

This will be the last time Maserati gets to enjoy a proper Ferrari engine - a 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 good for 433kW and 730Nm - before it moves to a more electrified future, but it’s certainly going out with a lot of loud bangs.

Deafeningly lovely, the V8, which drives the rear wheels, will shove you to a shouty 100km/h in 4.3 seconds (fast, but not stupidly so, although it feels even quicker) on your way to a very Italian top speed of 326km/h. 

We can report that it exceeds 200km/h with consummate ease and has epic amounts of torque on tap.

Jaecoo claims on the combined (urban/extra-urban) cycle the J8 Track 2WD will drink 8.3L/100km and the Ridge AWD will gulp 8.6L/100km, which is better than its similar sized rivals. But those rivals also have hybrid options that are more powerful and drink less fuel.

It also requires premium unleaded fuel, while the others drink the cheaper stuff.

A 65-litre fuel tank gives it a theoretical driving range of 755km in its thirstiest guise.

We didn’t get to spend enough time behind the wheel to do a thorough real-world test, and the majority of our drive was spent on high-speed arterial roads or motorways where petrol cars are at their most efficient. So we’ll reserve judgement until we undertake a more comprehensive test drive.

Maserati claims a slightly inexact fuel-economy figure of 12.3 to 12.6 litres per 100km, but good luck ever achieving it. The desire to open the taps and really chew some fuel will aways be overwhelming. 

We drove it on a race track and would easily have been exceeding 20 litres per 100km, so our test figure is probably best not spoken about.

There is a clear line of demarcation between the Chery brand and Jaecoo, and the J8 drives substantially better than Chery’s line of budget-friendly Tiggo SUVs.

We spent most of our time in the Ridge AWD and the fancy active suspension makes a huge impact. It keeps the vehicle in check through corners, exerting excellent body control. It's a bit unnerving how flat the car sits through the bends with next to no body roll.

Despite riding on giant 20-inch wheels the J8 soaks up bumps and road imperfections with ease.

The Track 2WD falls off noticeably in this regard without the active damping.

The steering is light and a bit floaty, which saps confidence when entering corners as there isn’t a lot of feedback on what is happening underneath you.

The steering ratio seems a bit wide of the mark, the wheel needing more input than we'd like.

The engine delivers decent grunt and it's tuned for leisurely acceleration rather than performance. 

There was the odd occasion when the transmission and the motor weren't quite in sync and you might get a bit of hesitation and then too much oomph all at once.

It has no problems getting up to speed on the motorway and handles overtaking with ease. 

Jaecoo, and its parent company Chery, have worked hard on the safety tech calibration and it's much less intrusive on the J8 than some earlier models. This applies especially to the lane keep assist, which only steps in when needed. There are far fewer bings and bongs than before.

You sit up nice and high in the J8, which gives you a good view of the road ahead, but the sloped rear window restricts vision out the back compared to boxier shaped SUVs.

It is a big rig and you feel that on the road, even the Jaecoo team said you’d notice the width of the J8 on the road, which might be an issue if you live in compact inner city areas or deal with cramped car spaces.

We were fortunate enough to drive all three Trofeo models - Ghibli, Levante and Quattroporte - on the track at Sydney Motorsport Park, which really is the only way to fully appreciate vehicles with Ferrari V8 engines, 433kW and rear-wheel drive.

Maserati is keen to point out that other premium brands don’t offer that kind of grunt in their rear-drive cars, indeed most of them are going all-wheel drive, and that level of playfulness is a real USP, it believes.

The thing is, the company also acknowledges that its buyers are older, wiser and wealthier types moving up from the German brands. 

The Trofeo range, in particular, then, is a real niche within a niche. I picture Maserati buyers as being slightly sedate yet stylish. Fans of the nicer things in life, but not flashy, or thrashy, about the cars they drive.

And yet, unlike other Maseratis, the Trofeos are flame-spitting beasts that sound like Game of Thrones dragons. Clearly there are people who like their classy Italian saloons to be insanely fast and track ready. And hooray for them, because as weird as it seems to flog a car like this so hard, the Trofeo Ghibli was well and truly up for it.

It’s also the pick of the litter, being less SUV like than the SUV Levante, and less stupidly long and heavy than the Quattroporte. 

Its shorter wheelbase and lighter weight make it the most fun and light on its feet when being thrown around. We hit an easy 235km/h on the front straight before hurling into Turn One well north of 160km/h, and the Ghibli just held on tight before using its torque to hurl it at the next bend.

It sounds, as I’ve said, amazing, but it’s worth saying again because it’s a real Maserati (or Ferrari, really) advantage of choosing this car.

The brakes are also up to the task of repeated track-hard stops, the steering is lighter and less talkative than a Ferrari perhaps, but still excellent, and the whole Trofeo Ghibli experience is best described, on circuit, as being better than you would possibly imagine.

Out on the road, you don’t have to put up with the firm ride that pressing the Corsa button compels, and the Ghibli reverts to its smooth, cruiser persona - while still looking sporty as hell.

The only letdown is the seats, which are a little on the firm side, but everything else about the cabin is so luxe you almost forgive it. 

While this car makes no sense to me, it obviously excites enough people for Maserati to make a business case, and charge $265,000 for the Trofeo Ghibli. Good luck to them, I say.

There is no ANCAP rating for the Ghibli as it has not been tested here. 

The Trofeo Ghibli comes with six airbags, Blind Spot Detection, Forward Collision Warning Plus, Pedestrian Detection, Adaptive Cruise Control, Lane Keep Assist, Active Driver Assist and Traffic sign Recognition.

Jaecoo backs its cars for eight years and unlimited km, which is one of the most comprehensive in the business. MG, Mitsubishi and Nissan all have 10 year warranties but are not unlimited km and Mitsubishi and Nissan need you to only service at their dealerships.

Jaecoo backs this up with an eight-year capped priced servicing program, which costs $2952 for the Track 2WD and $3452 for the Ridge AWD. That’s slightly on the expensive side but better than being at the whim of the mechanic after five years.

Keep in mind the fourth and eight year services are biggies, costing $699 and $799 in the Ridge AWD and $499 and $599 in the Track 2WD.

You also get eight years of roadside assistance if you service your car at the dealership.

Maserati offers a three-year, unlimited kilometre warranty, but you can choose to buy 12-month or two-year warranty extensions, and even a sixth or seventh-year drive-train warranty extension. 

When much, much cheaper Japanese and Korean cars are offering seven and even 10-year warranties, this is so far off the pace that such a fast vehicle should be embarrassed. And if you're buying something Italian, a better, longer warranty would seem like a must. I'd be negotiating at sale for them to throw the longer warranty offer in.

Maserati says servicing for the Ghibli has a "ball park costing of $2700.00 for the first three years of ownership" with a service schedule of every 20,000km or 12 months (whichever occurs first)

Also, "please note that the above is indicative only of the manufacturers basic routine service maintenance schedule and does not include any consumable items such as tyres, brakes etc or additional dealership charges such as environmental levies etc."