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PROS ›› Well-priced, luxurious, smooth drive CONS ›› Limited practicality, slow, no massage for driver

For decades, Japan has been home to the world’s best luxury MPVs. Vehicles like the Lexus LM, Toyota Alphard and Vellfire, as well as the Nissan Elgrand, have all become icons, perfectly catering to those who want to travel around in something akin to a private jet on wheels.

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However, in recent years, the Chinese have started to venture into this market. Companies like Denza, Zeekr, Li Auto, Nio, Hongqi, Maextro, BYD, and others all have their own luxury MPVs. One of the newer offerings in overseas markets is the M8 from GAC (Guangzhou Automobile Group).

Review: A $17,600 Price Made China’s 2026 GAC Emzoom Tempting, Until We Drove It

Eager to see if it delivers what a vehicle like this should, we recently lived with one for a week, driving it through cities, on long highway jaunts and road trips, and along narrow gravel. It proved impressively well-rounded, even though the market for a vehicle like it is small.

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QUICK FACTS

› Model: 2026 GAC M8 PHEV Luxury

› Starting Price: AU$83,590 ($57,800) excluding on-road costs

› Dimensions: 205.1 x 74.5 W x 71.7 in H (5,212 x 1,893 x 1,823 mm)

› Wheelbase: 120.8 in (3,070 mm)

› Curb Weight: 2,420 kg (5,335 lbs)

› Powertrain: 2.0-liter turbo / single electric motor

› Output: 367 hp (274 kW) / 465 lb-ft (630 Nm)

› 0-62 mph 8.8 seconds as tested

› Transmission: Two-speed

› Efficiency: 6.4 l/100 km (36.7 US mpg)

› On Sale: Now

SWIPE

Photo Credits Brad Anderson/Carscoops

The M8 is the third model that GAC has brought to Australia. It doesn’t aim to compete at the upper echelon of the luxury MPV market quite like alternatives from Denza and Maextro, and undercuts rivals like the VW ID. Buzz, while competing in a niche similar to the LDV Mifa 9 . A Kia Carnival is also available for similar money.

What The M8 Costs And What It’s Up Against

Just two versions of the M8 are sold. The first, known as the Premium, is priced from AU$76,590 ($53,000) before on-road costs, while the flagship Luxury, which we tested, starts at AU$83,590 ($57,900). To put that into perspective, the ID. Buzz starts at AU$87,990 ($60,900), prices for the LDV Mifa vary between AU$63,501 ($44,000) and AU$129,000 ($89,300), while the Kia Carnival is priced between AU$56,490 ($39,100) and AU$79,540 ($55,000).

Lexus LM

As for the Lexus LM, it opens at AU$147,571 (US$103,000) before on-road costs for the 247 hp (184 kW) Sports Luxury 2WD LM 350h, or AU$183,744 (US$128,253) driveaway. The LM 500h, which matches the M8 on power at 366 hp (273 kW), starts at AU$193,809 (US$135,279) before on-roads and AU$249,272 (US$173,992) with them. For the price of one LM 500h you could park two M8s in the driveway and still have AU$26,629 left over.

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Interestingly, the M8 is the only plug-in hybrid MPV sold in Australia. It’s sold exclusively with a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder working alongside a single electric motor and a 25.57 kWh battery. All up, it delivers 274 kW (367 hp) and 630 Nm (465 lb-ft) of torque, very solid figures indeed. However, as we discovered, it does not feel as quick as those numbers suggest. Drive is sent exclusively to the front wheels via a two-speed automatic transmission.

Like A Jet On Wheels

Photo Credits Brad Anderson/Carscoops

Vehicles like this have to feel plush in the cabin, and fortunately, the GAC M8 ticks that box.

The M8 is sold exclusively as a 3-row, seven-seater with captain’s chairs in the second row. Obviously, it’s the second row that GAC has focused much of its efforts on, but that’s not to say the driver and front passenger have been forgotten about.

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Cladding the dashboard is soft-touch leather, a material which extends onto the steering wheel, seats, and door panels. By new Chinese car standards, the overall layout of the dash is relatively traditional with no tablet-style infotainment screen standing out like a sore thumb. Instead, there’s a 12.3-inch digital gauge cluster and a 10.1-inch central display.

The cluster screen is excellent, although customization is limited. While I did appreciate the central screen from an aesthetic standpoint, the angle at which it sits made it prone to glare from the sun, so it was often hard to see during nice weather. I also couldn’t find any way to automatically adjust the brightness of the screen whether the headlights were on or off, meaning I’d have to manually lower the brightness after sunset.

Adorning the center console is at least a square foot of piano black plastic, which wasn’t particularly nice either. One odd feature I did like was the spinning UFO-shaped crystal added into the gear selector, not because it serves any purpose, as it doesn’t, but just because it’s unusual. The front seats offer heated and ventilated functions, but no massage option, which seems like a miss.

Photo Credits Brad Anderson/Carscoops

The real action happens in the second row. The captain’s chairs are superb, each incorporating a small touchscreen for fine adjustments and seat massage activation. Other welcome elements in the second row include a flat floor and an easily accessible, heated-and-cooled cupholder. There are even aircraft-style tray tables that fold down from the rear of the front seats.

Further adding to the premium feel of the cabin are two glass roofs and a soft-touch suede headliner. GAC has also added electric sliding doors, footrests, and a nice ambient lighting system, which includes colored GAC emblems in the second of the roof panels.

What’s not so good is the third row. Not only is there no easy way to quickly fold the second-row seats out of the way, but the rear seats are shockingly tight. Adults could fit back there at a pinch, but only for short trips, as both legroom and headroom are quite poor. This ultimately detracts from the usefulness of the M8 as a family car and may reduce its use to chauffeur service.

Quiet And Refined

With some pretty impressive power and torque figures, you could easily be confused into thinking it’d feel like quite an animal behind the wheel. It doesn’t, nor should a vehicle like this.

GAC claims the M8 PHEV can hit 100 km/h (62 mph) in roughly 8.8 seconds, but from behind the wheel, it feels a little slower than that. Generally, when accelerating hard, the M8 relies solely on electric power up to about 50 km/h (31 mph), then the 2.0-liter turbo kicks in, giving it a big dose of extra thrust.

What works surprisingly well is the front-wheel drive setup. Despite having significantly more grunt than flagship FWD hot hatches, the M8 doesn’t suffer from any understeer. Wheelspin off the line in slippery and cold conditions has also been kept to a minimum, perhaps in part due to the lethargic way the powertrain delivers its grunt.

Photo Credits Brad Anderson/Carscoops

As a vehicle like this should, the M8 PHEV is beautifully quiet on the open road, helped in part by the thick double-glazed side windows. The exterior design, including that absolutely massive chrome front grille and the intricate headlights and DRLs, isn’t so quiet, so drivers can expect to turn a lot of heads, as we found out firsthand.

Read: GAC Aion UT Is Coming For The VW ID.3 With Cute Looks

The relatively sizeable 26 kWh lithium-ion battery gives the M8 PHEV a solid all-electric driving range of 106 km (66 miles). Charging speeds are slow, as it only supports 6.6 kW AC and 39 kW DC charging. On the plus side, there is a driving range that’ll use the four-cylinder engine to recharge the battery, and it works quite quickly, even though it does temporarily increase fuel consumption.

Throughout my week with the GAC, I averaged 6.4 l/100 km (36.7 US mpg) and 4.6 kWh/100 km over a mix of suburban roads and rural highways. That fuel consumption figure is up from GAC’s claim of 1.3 l/100 km (181 US mpg), although that’s only if the battery pack is also kept topped up. Nonetheless, the figures we recorded are respectable for a vehicle that weighs 2,420 kg (5,335 lbs).

As we recently discovered with another GAC product, specifically the Aion UT, the M8 PHEV’s ride quality is superb. Vehicles as big as this all too frequently suffer from overly soft suspension setups that will leave them bouncing down the road and failing to settle over sharp bumps and inconsistencies in the road. That’s not the case here.

The M8 carries its weight exceptionally well and does an excellent job of smoothing out even the harshest of roads. Perhaps most importantly, it does this without feeling like an absolute bus through the corners.

Helping the M8 PHEV feel a little lighter than it actually is is the steering. Like the suspension, it has been well tuned, providing just the right amount of weight and directness for an electric system.

Verdict

Photo Credits Brad Anderson/Carscoops

Like so many other new Chinese cars to launch in Australia , and other markets, the M8 PHEV impresses. Admittedly, buyers will have to get over the glaring looks, but if they can, they’ll find a vehicle that feels premium and drives like a premium MPV should, for less than half the price of a Lexus LM 500h.

Given the seating layout and the tight third row, the M8 obviously won’t be a strong seller and likely won’t meet the needs of many families. But as a first attempt, it’s impressive.

Photo Credits Brad Anderson/Carscoops

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Astronomers have found the strongest evidence yet that a rocky planet beyond our solar system has managed to hold onto an atmosphere — a crucial ingredient for life as we know it.

The discovery marks the first time scientists have detected an atmosphere surrounding a rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of another star, the region around a star where temperatures could enable liquid water to exist on a planet's surface. The findings, published July 16 in the journal Science , could help astronomers narrow the search for potentially habitable worlds beyond our cosmic backyard.

"It's absolutely exciting," Edward Schwieterman , associate professor of astrobiology at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "We are getting closer to studying the atmospheres of worlds that could plausibly harbor life, with evidence of that life embedded in their observable spectra."

The planet, known as LHS 1140 b , lies about 48 light-years away from Earth and orbits a small, cool red dwarf star. At roughly 5.6 times Earth's mass, the exoplanet is classified as a super-Earth : a rocky planet larger than our own but much smaller than gas giants like Neptune.

It receives less than half the sunlight Earth gets, giving it an estimated surface temperature of around minus 53 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 47 degrees Celsius), according to previous estimates not accounting for an atmosphere. That makes the planet cold, but in the range astronomers consider potentially habitable.

Cosmic gas leak

Scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets over the past few decades, including many rocky worlds. But determining whether those planets have atmospheres has proven far more difficult, because atmospheres around rocky planets are incredibly thin compared with those of giant planets, making them much harder to detect across vast cosmic distances.

Instead of looking for the atmosphere directly, the researchers behind the new study searched for a subtle clue that one existed: helium gas leaking into space. Using the WINERED spectrograph on the Magellan Clay Telescope in Chile, the team watched LHS 1140 b cross in front of its star and let a sliver of starlight filter through the planet's atmosphere on its way to Earth. As it did, the team looked for a tiny dip in the star’s light at the exact wavelength of infrared light that helium blocks — a telltale sign that gas was streaming off the planet and into space.

The prediction rested entirely on a mathematical model that had never been confirmed for a rocky planet. However, in September 2024, the team caught LHS 1140 b and a smaller, hotter neighboring planet, LHS 1140 c , transiting their star on the same night, less than 40 minutes apart. The researchers detected a clear helium signal from LHS 1140 b, while LHS 1140 c showed nothing.

NASA concept art depicting LHS 1140 b as a rocky super-Earth — a type of potentially habitable planet most similar to our own. (Image credit: NASA) The contrast matters: LHS 1140 c orbits much closer to its star than LHS 1140 b does and receives roughly five times the radiation, yet it's also smaller and less gravitationally bound — conditions that should make any escaping gas easier, not harder, to spot. Finding nothing there suggests LHS 1140 c's atmosphere was stripped away long ago, while LHS 1140 b, sitting farther out in cooler, calmer conditions, has managed to hold onto its own.

The discovery addresses a question astronomers have been working to answer for decades.

"Twenty years ago we wondered whether other terrestrial-type planets even existed," study co-author Robin Wordsworth , a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, said in a statement . "Then we learned they're common, and found some in the habitable zone. The next question was whether any of them had managed to keep an atmosphere. Now we know at least one has."

A step forward in the hunt for life

The find is especially notable because red dwarf stars like LHS 1140 can bombard nearby planets with high-energy radiation capable of stripping atmospheres away over time. Based on the star's estimated age of at least 3.1 billion years, the researchers say LHS 1140 b's atmosphere has likely persisted despite that bombardment, suggesting some rocky planets around these common stars can hang onto their atmospheres for far longer than once assumed.

But the researchers caution that detecting helium does not mean the planet is inhabited — or even that it is habitable. The observations reveal only the planet's thin upper atmosphere, not its full composition. Scientists still don't know whether LHS 1140 b has oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor or other gases that could make its surface more Earth-like and hospitable to life.

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Instead, the discovery opens a new way to study distant rocky worlds.

"The study demonstrates that, at least in some cases, we will be able to begin characterizing the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets," Schwieterman said. "If only rocky planets orbiting Sun-like stars retained atmospheres, we might have to wait one to two decades for the launch of the Habitable Worlds Observatory to search for biosignatures on rocky planets. I'm certainly excited about what comes next!"

Future observations will aim to determine what the rest of LHS 1140 b's atmosphere is made of and investigate whether it may harbor oceans or other features associated with habitability.