Omoda 9 vs Lifestyle Reconn R2

What's the difference?

Does Australia need yet another new car brand?

It’s the question I keep asking myself seemingly every other week as a new brand announces its intention to join the other 70 odd marques already competing for a slice of the Australia new-car market.

Chery made a successful re-entry into the Australian market in 2023, quickly establishing itself as a value-led brand. Earlier this year it launched Jaecoo, its more premium, adventure-focused offering and announced it would be spun-off into separate showrooms alongside the new Omoda brand.

The first Omoda-badged vehicle has now arrived, the Omoda 9 Virtue SHS (Super Hybrid System), which will join the almost-as-new Jaecoo J7 and J8 in the growing number of dealers around Australia.

So, does Australia need Omoda? Does the Omoda 9 Virtue SHS make a compelling case, in the same way the sharply-priced Chery models have? 

Read on for our verdict.

Once upon a time Queensland was the home of Aussie camper-trailer manufacturing and companies, such as Lifestyle Camper Trailers, were pumping out camper after camper to happy customers. But then came the imports and the price that people were willing to pay for the product dropped very quickly. Many local companies succumbed and just went out of business, others started importing their own and some innovated, developing new products; Lifestyle did two of the three. 

Today Lifestyle only builds light-weight, heavily off-road caravans which it calls Hypercampers and others would call a hybrid caravan, because it takes some elements of a camper-trailer and others of a caravan. It has four models, one of which is built in China in a factory the company part-owns. The other three, including the Reconn R2, which I’m testing, is built in Queensland.