mReview: Aion Y Plus Premium – One To Keep An Eye On

The Aion Y Plus may be one of the best bang-for-your-buck vehicles on the market, with loads of features and impressive levels of practicality for a palatable price. 

Aion might be a newcomer to the Singapore market, having made its local debut in 2024. But the brand itself is not a new one. Aion was first founded in 2018 under the Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC) umbrella and have been making electric cars since.

The Aion nameplate handles the mass-market product offerings from GAC and it really has marketed well to the masses. In 2023, Aion was the third-largest EV brand both in China and globally after Tesla and BYD. And in 2024, Aion became the third best-selling EV car brand in Singapore after BYD and Tesla as well. 

This colour is called Lucky Gold, although it's really more of a Sugee Cake Yellow.

To understand why the Aion Y Plus and the Aion brand in general have been such a hit, the most obvious place to start is the price. The Aion Y Plus is the second-cheapest EV (only behind Aion’s own ES) on sale in Singapore and the third-cheapest car (behind the Aion ES and Suzuki Swift) full stop.  

However, although the ES felt about as barebones an EV as you could get, the same simply cannot be said for the Y Plus. The Y Plus is incredibly well-equipped, especially in the Premium spec our test car came in. 

405 litres of boot space normally with up to 1,200 litres when the rear seats are folded down.

The Y Plus Premium comes standard with electric seats for both the driver and passenger, Apple CarPlay, 32-colour ambient lighting, adaptive cruise control with traffic assist, lane departure warning, lane keep assist, forward collision warning, automatic emergency braking, a 560˙ camera, and even a premium Bongiovi sound system.

That is a truly impressive array of features to be offered as standard for a car of this price point, which once again is a price point that just can’t be beaten in this day and age, not least for a car of this size.  

I don't know why, but the Y Plus just reminds me of the ride car from the Transformers ride at Universal Studios.

The Y Plus might not look especially large from the outside but like the magic tents in Harry Potter, the interior space is absolutely palatial. Rear passengers get a frankly insane 1,020mm of legroom and enough headroom to make Marge Simpson feel at home, even without cracking open the panoramic sunroof. The floor is also completely flat and the doors open up to 90-degrees to make ingress and egress a cinch. 

The front seats are no less impressive, they can be reclined fully flat to create a bed for ultimate lounging capability to stay comfy while the car is recharging. The Y Plus can charge at up to 90kW on a DC fast charger and 6.6kW on an AC charger. Filling the 63.2kWh battery from 20% to 80% on a fast charger takes around 40 minutes and a full charge lasts 430km based on the WLTP combined estimate. 

Bar none, one of the most expansive rear cabins I've ever been in.

Driving the Y Plus was a pleasant surprise. The ride quality is very decent, nowhere near as harsh as the Smart #1 and incredibly comfortable for all occupants. The insulation is also fantastic with a silent, serene drive every time. 

The car was also rather zippy in sport mode, unleashing its Cat A COE-compliant 134hp and 225Nm of torque to scoot me from 0-100km/h in 9.8 seconds. I imagine part of that zippiness is down to the Y Plus being relatively light for an EV, weighing in at 1.7 tons. 

I still think it looks like the ride car at an amusement park.

Unfortunately, the Y Plus falters in its software. As with most modern cars, all of the Y Plus’s features and settings are accessible only through the centre 14.6-inch infotainment display or the buttons on the multifunction steering wheel. 

However, during my test period, I found the UI to be quite glitchy. The steering wheel buttons completely died on me several times and the centre display also bugged out fairly often, preventing me from adjusting anything until I hard reset the displays (which only temporarily fixed the issue). 

The fit and finish is solid and the infotainment system works most of the time.

There were also less serious but no less annoying bugs like the fact that you can tap the main screen to go into different drive modes but the indicator of what mode you’re in never changes on the screen, only in the digital gauge cluster. Now that wouldn’t be such an issue except once I had changed my drive mode, I couldn’t tap on any other mode to change it back!

It seems the software side hasn’t yet caught up with the quality of the hardware. It’s a shame because the rest of the Y Plus is incredibly impressive. 

At just a smidge over S$150k (accurate at the time of writing), the Y Plus Premium is a phenomenal deal for what it is, even if it is a little glitchy. 

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