Can the Avatr 07 persuade buyers to look beyond established brands?

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More practical and more refined than the Avatr 11, the Avatr 07 combines luxury, technology and everyday usability in a package that feels increasingly hard to ignore.

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22 Jun 2026 06:17AM

(Updated: 22 Jun 2026 06:28AM)

There is a moment, when you first sit in the Avatr 07, when you realise you're not entirely sure why the steering wheel isn't round. Something brash, perhaps. Something loudly futuristic, or loudly determined to prove a point. What you get instead is something more F1-inspired. More on that later.

The 07 arrives in Singapore as a Category B electric SUV, a designation that, in Singapore’s context, carries roughly the same financial gravity as acquiring a small yacht. It comes in two forms: the rear-wheel-drive Max and the all-wheel-drive Ultra. Both are aimed squarely at buyers who have already concluded that an electric car is the sensible choice and would now quite like it to be a pleasant one as well.

This, it turns out, is precisely what Avatr has been thinking about. The question is whether it has thought about it twice, because for those familiar with the brand’s earlier Avatr 11, there is a distinct sense, on the surface at least, that one has been here before.

THE GHOST OF THE 11

The 11 was a genuinely interesting car. Its interior was loaded with plush surfaces, thoughtful features and genuine comfort. Its coupe-SUV silhouette was a distinctive piece of design, with a rear window reminiscent of the Ferrari Dino, a retractable spoiler and continuous taillights that gave it a road presence its rivals couldn’t easily match. It also carried the same essential DNA as the 07: designed in Munich under Nader Faghihzadeh, a former BMW designer with a 17-year career at the company, and built on the CHN platform – a vehicle architecture jointly developed by Changan, Huawei and CATL.

So when you climb into the 07 and find a 35.4-inch 4K panoramic display, a 15.6-inch touchscreen powered by Huawei’s HarmonyOS, and a 2,016-watt, 16-speaker Pioneer sound system with eight-point massage seats, you could be forgiven a mild sense of deja vu. It is, by any measure, a very similar brief.

And yet. The 07 does not feel like a reprint. It feels like a revision, albeit a meaningful one. And here’s where views are divided on its steering wheel. The wheel is shaped in a manner that is visually striking and, in tight manoeuvres, conversationally interesting. These were also tendencies noted in the 11, which suggests Avatr has a particular house style when it comes to mild driver irritants.

If you’ve raced in a go-kart, this might be an easy switch; otherwise, it might take some adjustment. Make no mistake, however, the steering wheel is perfectly safe and ergonomic.

The 07 is a proper mid-size SUV with real-world practicality as part of its identity. The proportions are cleaner. The sculpted body, ultra-slim lights, flush door handles and sleek glasshouse give it a road presence that belies its 4.8m length – visible and yet nimble.

The 07 also builds on a more mature understanding of what its occupants actually want. The cabin is more resolved, the legroom ample, the materials more consistently impressive and the sense of architectural calm more deliberately realised.

THE INTERIOR, WHICH IS WHERE IT ALL BEGINS

This is where you will spend virtually all of your time in Singapore, moving at speeds that rarely threaten the structural integrity of the atmosphere. The cabin is genuinely impressive, in the architectural sense. Someone, at some point, sat down and thought carefully about what sort of room this should be and made decisions accordingly.

The panoramic display is the obvious centrepiece and, to its credit, it earns its prominence rather than merely occupying it. Whether this represents a philosophical shortcut or simply good engineering prioritisation, one can debate over a reasonably long lunch. What is beyond debate is that the Nappa leather feels suitably premium, the sunroof is the sort of thing you appreciate on a cloudy day, and the soft-close doors shut with that particular thud that tells you mass has been managed rather than merely added.

There are, it must be said, moments where the devotion to minimalism tips into mild inconvenience. Adjusting the air-conditioning vents requires a sortie into the touchscreen, which, on a scorching afternoon, is not the most efficient arrangement imaginable. This is not a fatal flaw. It is the sort of thing that a marque with decades of customer feedback tends to have sorted out. Avatr is still accumulating that feedback. One rather hopes it is listening.

ON THE ROAD, WHERE CALM PROVES RATHER MORE USEFUL THAN DRAMA

The Max variant produces 252kW and 365Nm, enough to reach 100km/h in 6.8 seconds – a full 0.6 seconds quicker than the equivalent rear-wheel-drive 11, which managed the same sprint in 7.4 seconds. The 07 also benefits from an 800V electrical architecture and CATL’s newer Shenxing LFP battery, which replaces the NMC cells used in the 11 – a meaningful upgrade in terms of charging speed, thermal stability and long-term cycle life.

What the 07 delivers on the road is genuine dynamic engagement, however gentle. It does not lurch or perform. It simply moves, with a composed fluency that makes most of the things happening around it feel slightly frantic by comparison. I took it along Thomson Road towards Ang Mo Kio, through the reconfigured stretches around Marymount, and it dived into the bends with surprising composure. The ride quality is composed, although some body roll is noticeable if you’re not expecting it. Singapore’s roads are not Monaco, and the 07 deals with their imperfections in much the way a well-brought-up person deals with social awkwardness, by giving no outward sign of having noticed them at all.

THE TECHNICAL MATTER, BRIEFLY

The 82.16kWh LFP battery offers up to 488km of WLTP range in Max specification, which, in the context of our little island, renders range anxiety not merely manageable but faintly absurd. The 800V architecture supports DC charging at up to 420kW, enabling a 30 to 80 per cent charge in approximately ten minutes under optimal conditions. These are serious figures that put the 07 meaningfully ahead of the 11’s charging capability and make some rather more expensive competitors look as though they’ve been napping.

The self-parking system is particularly well-suited to Singapore’s carparks, which appear to have been designed by someone harbouring a specific grudge against the door mirrors of premium SUVs. Here, technology earns its keep rather than advertising its existence.

IS IT DEJA VU, THEN?

The honest answer is: partly, and deliberately so. The 07 shares its platform, its Munich design heritage, its Huawei-CATL parentage and its broad philosophy with the 11. Viewed side-by-side, the two models look similar from the front. Walking into the 07’s cabin will also feel familiar to anyone who has spent time in the earlier car.

But it is a refinement, not a repetition. The 07 is lighter in its footprint, more practical in its proportions, more technically advanced in its powertrain and more settled in its interior quality. The 11 was always a statement car, a coupe-SUV for people who wanted to be noticed. The 07 is something slightly more interesting: a car for people who want to arrive feeling that everything about their journey was quietly, unhurriedly correct.

THE QUESTION OF PRESTIGE, WHICH IS RATHER MORE COMPLICATED

The honest reservation about the Avatr 07 is not the car itself. The reservation is the name on the bonnet, or more precisely, what that name does not yet convey to the person walking past in a carpark.

In Singapore’s premium market, where social semiotics matter rather more than many people openly acknowledge, Avatr does not yet carry the weight of decades of accumulated aspiration that certain three-pointed stars or Bavarian propellers enjoy by default.

What it offers instead is something that might prove more interesting: a product that is genuinely trying to think about what luxury means now, rather than what it meant in 1975. The 07 is not conservative. It is not, in any meaningful sense, derivative of anything outside its own lineage. It is a car designed by people who looked at the established premium formula and concluded, with some justification, that there was room for improvement.

For a certain kind of buyer who finds brand heritage reassuring, this may not be quite enough. For the kind who looks at things as they are rather than as they have always been, the Avatr 07 may feel less like an alternative and rather more like an answer.

It is, all things considered, a more interesting car than it has any particular obligation to be. Which is rather the highest compliment one can pay.

Source: CNA/bt