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There is a stretch of road at the Lang Lang Proving Ground, south-east of Melbourne, where Holden engineers once spent the better part of three decades tuning Commodores to within an inch of their lives.

The gates are quieter now. The Lion badge is gone. But the asphalt is still there, and so, as it happens, is Rob Trubiani — the man who once led chassis dynamics on cars like the VE SS — now turning his attention to something rather different: a mid-size SUV from a Chinese manufacturer.

The car in question is the GWM Haval H6 PHEV Ultra, and it costs $44,990 drive-away. That figure is worth sitting with for a moment, because by the time you've finished reading this, it should feel even more improbable than it does now.

Australia's love affair with the electrified vehicle has accelerated sharply in recent months. Data from our own CarSauce Buy inquiries suggests that close to four in five prospective buyers are now looking at a hybrid, plug-in hybrid or full EV.

The reasons are not mysterious. Petrol hovers around $2.60 a litre. Charging infrastructure, outside the capitals at least, remains patchy. The plug-in hybrid — long dismissed by purists as a compromise — has quietly emerged as the format that best fits the actual geography of Australian life.

The Haval H6 PHEV has been the unexpected beneficiary of that shift.

The spec sheet reads like a misprint

Underneath the bonnet sits a 1.5-litre turbocharged four-cylinder, paired with an 80kW electric motor on the front axle and — more interestingly — a 150kW motor at the rear.

The combined output is 268kW and 760Nm, enough to shove this family-shaped SUV from a standstill to 100km/h in 4.58 seconds when tested on a slight incline with proper timing equipment.

For context, that is quicker than certain variants of the 911 Carrera. It is also roughly three seconds faster than most of the car's direct competition, which tends to struggle to break eight seconds.

The battery is a usefully sized 19.1kWh — on the larger end for a plug-in hybrid in this segment — good for about 100 kilometres of real-world electric range on an observed consumption figure of 19kWh/100km.

DC fast charging tops out at a fairly unremarkable 34kW, though given that most owners will top up overnight at home this is less of a limitation than it sounds; a domestic 7kW wallbox will fill it in about two and a half hours.

Run the numbers over a typical 20,000km year — 70 per cent urban, petrol at $2.60, electricity at 33c/kWh — and the PHEV comes in around $1,720 to run. The petrol-only H6 costs closer to $3,846.

The conventional hybrid lands between them at $2,807. None of this will surprise anyone who has spent time modelling PHEV economics, but the gap widens every time fuel prices rise, which they show every sign of continuing to do.

An Australian accent

The more interesting story, though, is what happens between the driver and the road.

Trubiani's work on the H6 is the sort of thing that rarely makes it into press releases, and when it does, it is easy to overlook. That would be a mistake here.

Under a program GWM has christened AT-1 — Australian Tuned — the company's local engineering team has carefully reworked the steering calibration (thousands of parameters, according to Trubiani, refined across thousands of kilometres of assessment driving on Australian roads) and developed bespoke damper packages for each of the five powertrain variants in the H6 range.

The PHEV AWD alone went through roughly 25 damper iterations at the front axle and somewhere between 40 and 45 at the rear.

The results are apparent from the first corner. The car settles gracefully over mid-corner bumps, the steering has a genuine precision that is increasingly rare at this price point, and there is a composure to the way it handles compression and rebound that speaks to engineers who have spent real time on real roads.

Trubiani himself is characteristically modest about the work. The underlying architecture from head office, he says, is excellent — it gives his team a strong foundation to build on.

And with Chinese development cycles moving at pace, his team is increasingly being brought in earlier in the process, meaning future GWM models will arrive with AT-1 tuning engineered in from the outset rather than applied after the fact.

Where it could be better

It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The front seats, while heated and cooled and trimmed in leather accents on the Ultra, are too flat in the base; taller or larger drivers will want more under-thigh support.

The rear is, curiously, the better place to sit. The styling at the back of the car is inoffensive rather than striking. The charging speed is adequate rather than impressive.

But the cabin has moved on considerably with the facelift. The new central touchscreen runs GWM's Coffee OS, which is responsive and legible in a way earlier Haval infotainment systems emphatically were not. The 360-degree camera remains among the best in the segment. Apple CarPlay connects wirelessly.

The nine-speaker audio in the Ultra is a genuine improvement. Boot space comfortably clears 500 litres with the second row in place. Vehicle-to-load capability, rated at 3.3kW, is more than a gimmick for anyone who camps or works off-grid.

The quiet recalibration

The car industry in Australia has spent the past several years watching Chinese manufacturers improve at a rate that was, for a while, easy to dismiss. That window has closed.

The H6 PHEV Ultra is not a car that needs to be graded on a curve. It is quick, it is efficient, it rides and handles with genuine competence, and it costs less than the list price of a mid-spec Toyota RAV4 Hybrid.

Whether it deserves to be on your shortlist is a question only your circumstances can answer. But it deserves, at minimum, to be considered on the same terms as anything else in the segment — and for a long time, that was not something you could reasonably say.

Readers considering a Haval H6 PHEV can have our broker team negotiate on their behalf, obligation-free, via CarSauce Buy!