First Drive: The Solari EV-9 Doesn’t Try to Be Clever, and That Works in Its Favor

The first thing you notice about the Solari EV-9 is what it does not have. No gimmick steering yoke, no fake engine noise piped through the speakers, no twelve-inch tablet bolted where the climate controls should be. It has a wheel, two real dials, and a touchscreen sized for its job instead of for a spec sheet. After a day in the mountains outside the launch venue, that restraint turned out to be the whole story.

It drives like an engineer was allowed to finish the job before marketing got involved.

Power comes from a 99 kWh pack feeding a dual-motor setup good for 402 horsepower, and the tuning favors control over drama. Stab the accelerator and the EV-9 does not throw your head back; it just goes, cleanly, with the kind of linear response that makes a three-row SUV feel smaller than it is. Body control on broken pavement is the best in the segment, helped by a low center of gravity and dampers that were clearly set up by someone who drives for fun on their own time.

Where it gives some back

Regenerative braking has only two settings, and neither is quite aggressive enough for true one-pedal driving. The third row is fine for kids, tight for adults on anything past thirty minutes. And the base infotainment software occasionally hesitates for a beat before responding to input, a small thing that stands out precisely because everything else feels finished.

Specs at a glance

None of that is enough to change the recommendation. If you need three rows and you are cross-shopping electric SUVs, put this one on the list first and measure everything else against it.

If you are cross-shopping an EV like this, it is worth reading up on what home charging actually requires before it arrives, and on why range anxiety is smaller than it feels once you run your own numbers. For official range and efficiency figures across every EV on sale, the EPA’s fuel economy database is the source we cross-check against.