Chinese cars are not normally our bag on SACarFan, we like to assume that most of our 50 000 plus monthly readers are actually car fans and therefore not interested in Chinese knock offs. However, this Great Wall Motors H5 (not a Hover as some people have been calling it) is really very, very cheap. And while cheapness isn’t a virtue, in some cases perhaps it should be, particularly when new car prices are as high as they are these days.

The GWM H5 costs R249 990 for a 4×2 manual and R264 990 for a 4×2 automatic. That’s cheap. You can add R20 000 onto each for the 4×4 versions, although we couldn’t get to drive those because they hadn’t arrived on the boat yet from China, not a lie. Then you start to look through the brochure and see what type of specification comes on this cheap as chips (or egg-fried-noodles) car. Try: Cruise control, MP3/CD-player with USB and aux-in jack, rear park camera, electronic tyre pressure monitors, Bluetooth, steering wheel mounted audio controls, six-way adjustable electric seats, centre console touch screen media centre, tinted windows, 17-inch alloy wheels and a full-sized spare wheel. That’s like the spread at your local ‘Far-East-R5-Shoppe.’

But just like the inventory at a R5 shop, I’m afraid, none of it seems to really work; and none of it is stuff you really want. People tend to buy from those stores just because it’s so damn cheap. Plastic ‘Luger’ shaped BB-gun: check. Orange toilet brush: check. ‘Jesus Loves You’ cap: check. The H5 seems to follow the exact same retail principle. You get the sense that it’s full of only what the manufacturer could get their hands on for dirt cheap, not stuff they actually wanted in the car. That’s fine when you’re buying a R5 toilet brush, not so fine when it’s a quarter of a million car you’re going home with.

So, the H5 has these amazing electronic tyre pressure monitors, but they display in the rear view mirror, and that’s weird. And I don’t even know if they work because the readings didn’t change once throughout the whole day’s driving. The stereo plays very little else except the soothing sounds of ‘Static FM’; the reading light didn’t work on the passenger’s side; the H5 only shows you your current fuel consumption, not an average consumption, or range, or average speed, which renders it utterly pointless in my opinion; and after two seconds of trying to set up the Bluetooth through the media centre on the fascia, I decided to better spend my time eating the much more useful mints that were in the door pocket.

Then we must get to all the oily bits that make the H5 move, presumably. Although, again, like most of the other componentry, it’s hard to know if some of it is actually working as it should. The engine is a four cylinder, 2.0-litre, common rail, turbo diesel, and its GWM’s own unit. It makes 110 kW and 310 Nm and is matted to either a five-speed auto or six-speed manual transmission. We drove the automatic and couldn’t help but notice the huge, tectonic shift, amount of lag this drivetrain provides. We’re talking several seconds of foot welded to the floor before anything happens. This makes turning across a busy junction quite exciting, if you could call it that; because I might call it frightening. Especially considering the H5 only has two airbags: driver and passenger. It also doesn’t have any vehicle stability control or traction control, but then again perhaps the total lack of drive from a standstill is its own form of traction control.

After the moment’s hesitation the power does lunge into life quite violently from there, lovely… but then runs out of puff again very quickly, with it only revving into the 4 000 r/min region. The automatic gearbox itself is an old Hyundai unit and it does work smoothly I have to say, providing smooth shifts once you’re on the move. I tried to find out from someone at GWM what the reason is for this lag, and worryingly the answer was, “I don’t know, China keep us in the dark about such things.” I felt for the guy, if that’s the type of product support he’s being provided with.

My co-driver and I soon came to terms with the fact that driving the GWM H5 automatic needed some rather advanced sense of fourth dimensional time. You needed to always be aware of where you’d be, and any prevailing traffic situations; about four seconds into the future, after your foot was welded down long enough to force the diesel motor into full life. To quote my co-driver: “…the GWM H5’s power output is at its own discretion, not yours.” Quite right, it’s pretty useless.

Points that I do appreciate on the GWM H5 however, are the dials. I think they’re very good for a Chinese car, the ride is pretty comfortable, the NVH levels are acceptable, the materials on the interior (aside from one or two little gaps and the way the indicator stalks don’t click, but crunch, when you operate them) are bearable and the touch screen media interface is actually pretty good.

Fine, you may be thinking to yourself, there are some good points to it you see. You’d be willing to overlook its negatives in lieu of these and its cheapness and value for money, but what’s lacking most of all, for me, in this car, is a sense of well-being – and the safety equipment, that goes without saying. Also, come to think of it, is it really all that cheap? A 2.0-litre diesel KIA Sportage 4×2 with an automatic gearbox is R307 995. For only an extra R45 000 you can have a proper SUV, not a knock off one.

Pricing includes a 3-year/100 000km warranty.