Subaru Solterra vs Zeekr 7X

Subaru lists the Solterra AWD at $61,990 and the Solterra AWD Touring at $67,990. Those are Subaru's own list prices for the MY26 car, before on-road costs. Worth knowing before you get excited: Subaru's website can also quote a recommended driveaway price that folds in twelve months' registration, stamp duty, a CTP estimate and dealer delivery, and it moves with your postcode, so the number a retailer says out loud will be several thousand above the list figure. Premium paint is $660 on either variant, and the Touring's two-tone finish is $1,500.

Zeekr is the harder half of this comparison, and we are going to be blunt about why. Zeekr Australia does not publish a price for the 7X anywhere a buyer can read one. Not on the model page, not in the national brochure, which runs a full two-page specification table and no price list, and not in any of its launch or news posts. The only way to get a number is the Build & Price configurator, which asks for your postcode before it will show you anything and is built around a drive-away total rather than a list price. Everything Zeekr does print in its own marketing is drive-away too: the banner running across its Australian site right now advertises the smaller Zeekr X "from $48,900 Driveaway".

Our stored figures for the three 7X grades are $57,900, $63,900 and $72,900, and we use them below because they are the best figures we have. But we could not confirm any of them against Zeekr Australia this week, and we cannot tell you what they measure. If they are list prices, the 7X RWD is $4,090 under the Solterra AWD. If they turn out to be drive-away, as everything visible on Zeekr's own Australian site suggests, the real gap is thousands wider again, because Subaru's $61,990 has registration, stamp duty, CTP and delivery still to come on top. The direction is safe in either case. The precision is not, so get a written quote before you compare the two on price.

Subaru Solterra (single-speed, all-wheel drive)

Zeekr 7X (single-speed, 800V)

Read those two tables together and you get two completely different arguments, which is why this page exists.

Match the drivetrains and the Subaru wins by a mile. Every Solterra is all-wheel drive. The only all-wheel-drive 7X is the Performance AWD at $72,900, roughly eleven thousand above the base Solterra. But that Zeekr is a 475kW, 710Nm, 3.8-second car on 21-inch forged wheels with air suspension and Akebono brakes. It is not the same kind of object as a 252kW family SUV and pretending the two are rivals flatters nobody.

Match the money and it flips hard. The 7X RWD comes in under the cheapest Solterra, and for that you get a longer, wider car with a bigger screen, more power and charging hardware from a class above. Step up to the Long Range RWD, still under a Solterra Touring on our figures, and you get 615km of WLTP range against the Touring's 517km. That is the honest comparison, and it is the one that should worry Subaru.

Both cars carry a current five-star ANCAP rating awarded in 2025 under the 2025 protocols, both were published on the same day in February 2026, and both ratings run to December 2031. The scores are genuinely close and they split down the middle.

The Zeekr takes the two crash-protection categories, the Subaru takes the two about not crashing in the first place. Four points either way is noise. Both are strong results and neither should decide this on its own.

Two details get flattened in a spec table and are worth reading properly. The Solterra's rating is based on testing of the closely-related Toyota bZ4X, with ANCAP supplied additional technical information and test data to show the bZ4X results apply to the Subaru. That is a normal ANCAP process rather than a shortcut, but it is worth knowing where the number came from. The rating also covers only cars built from October 2025 onwards; earlier Solterras carry a separate rating, which matters if you are cross-shopping a demonstrator.

The Zeekr's rating covers all variants, including the cheapest one. ANCAP notes dual frontal, side chest and side head airbags plus a front centre airbag as standard across the range, with AEB covering car-to-car, vulnerable road users, junction assist and backover, a lane support system and speed sign recognition on every 7X. The Solterra matches that list and adds a driver's knee airbag, for eight in total against the Zeekr's seven. Both get a 360-degree camera on every variant, so nobody is parking blind here.

This is where the price gap stops looking like a rounding error, and there is no kind way to put it for the Subaru.

The base 7X RWD arrives with a 16-inch 3.5K mini-LED centre screen, a 13.02-inch driver cluster, a Qualcomm 8295 cabin chip, tri-zone climate, heated front and rear seats, a heated steering wheel, front seat memory, power adjustment for both front seats, dual 50-watt wireless chargers, a panoramic glass roof with a powered sunshade, frameless doors with hidden handles, a power liftgate with opening-angle memory, a UWB key fob and NFC card, sentry mode, CarPlay and Android Auto, a 360-degree camera, a ten-speaker audio system and a 3.3kW vehicle-to-load outlet.

The $61,990 Solterra AWD answers with a 14-inch touchscreen, a 7-inch driver display, six speakers, heated front and rear outboard seats, a heated steering wheel, two wireless Qi chargers, a digital rear-view mirror, a hands-free powered tailgate, roof rails and carrier brackets, 18-inch alloys, dual-zone climate with rear vents, wireless CarPlay and Android Auto, satellite navigation and DAB+. Subaru does not list a head-up display for either Solterra. It also holds the panoramic roof, the ventilated seats, the 10-speaker Harman Kardon system, the memory driver's seat and the V2L outlet back for the $67,990 Touring.

That last sentence is the whole problem. On the Subaru you buy the top grade to get a panoramic roof and a V2L outlet; on the Zeekr they come on the cheapest one. The Zeekr is not spotless either, mind: the base 7X misses the 36.21-inch head-up display, the ventilated and massaging front seats, the privacy glass and the 21-speaker 7.1.4 audio, all of which start at the Long Range RWD. But the base Zeekr is still the better-equipped car by a comfortable margin, and the base Subaru behaves like an entry grade at a mid-$60,000 price.

Where Subaru pulls back is the stuff that does not show on a screen. X-Mode with the new Grip Control function is standard on both Solterras, alongside Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive, 212mm of ground clearance measured at kerb weight and roof rails you can bolt a load to. Zeekr's brochure lists no off-road modes, no hill-descent function and 173mm of clearance at the front. One of these was designed around a gravel road and the other around a fast charger, and both did the job they set out to do.

The Solterra AWD runs a permanent-magnet motor on each axle, 167kW and 268Nm at the front and 88kW and 169Nm at the rear, which Subaru quotes as 252kW combined. Subaru does not publish a 0-100km/h time for the Solterra anywhere in its Australian material, and that is a choice rather than an oversight. Subaru sells traction, not a stopwatch.

Zeekr sells the stopwatch. The 7X RWD and Long Range RWD both use a single 310kW, 440Nm rear silicon-carbide motor for roughly 6.0 seconds to 100km/h. The Performance AWD adds a 165kW front motor for 475kW, 710Nm and about 3.8 seconds, which is supercar territory in a five-seat family SUV.

Range is closer than the price gap suggests. The Solterra AWD claims up to 566km WLTP from a 74.7kWh CATL pack; the base 7X claims 480km from a 75kWh LFP Golden Brick pack. Nearly identical batteries, 86km apart, and the reason is efficiency. Subaru publishes 146Wh/km for the AWD and 160Wh/km for the Touring. Zeekr publishes no consumption figure for Australia at all, but the arithmetic on its own numbers gives roughly 156Wh/km for the 75kWh car and 163Wh/km for the 100kWh one. The Subaru is the more frugal of the two, and it is the smaller car, so that tracks.

And then charging turns the whole thing over. The Solterra takes 150kW on DC and Subaru quotes approximately 30 minutes from 10 to 80 percent. The 7X runs a full-stack 800-volt system and takes 450kW on the base car or 420kW on the 100kWh variants, with Zeekr quoting 13 minutes from 10 to 80 percent for the RWD and 16 minutes for the bigger battery. Those Zeekr figures are a best case on a liquid-cooled supercharger at room temperature, and Australia has very few chargers that can feed them, so real stops will be longer. Even halved, the gap is enormous. Home charging is a level playing field: both take up to 22kW on three-phase AC, and Subaru also quotes about 12 hours for a full charge on a 7kW single-phase wallbox.

WLTP is a laboratory number and neither car will hit it at 110km/h with the air conditioning on. Our range estimator works from battery size and real conditions rather than the brochure, which is the more useful way to think about a road trip.

ANCAP files the Zeekr 7X as a Medium SUV and the Subaru Solterra as a Small SUV, and once you see the numbers you understand why.

Three of those rows say "not published" and that is not us being coy. Zeekr's 7X brochure runs a full two-page specification table and prints no boot volume, no mass and no towing rating. The car plainly has a big boot, but we will not set a number beside Subaru's measured 421 litres when nobody has said what it measures, and boot figures swing by a hundred litres depending on whether you fill to the roof or the parcel shelf. Towing matters more, because that is a number people load to. If Zeekr has not published one, get it from the dealer in writing.

The shape of the difference is not in doubt, though. The 7X is a longer, wider, lower-riding car on a 2,900mm wheelbase, with rear seats that power-recline through ten degrees and heated rear seats on every grade. The Solterra is 70mm narrower, which is the difference between comfortable and careful in an older car park, turns 0.4 metres tighter, and sits 39mm higher with real underbody clearance rather than a styling ride height. Subaru also fits roof rails and carrier brackets to both variants as standard, which sounds trivial until you try to mount a bike rack on something that has none. Zeekr's brochure lists roof rails on no 7X at all.

Both cars carry five years and unlimited kilometres of vehicle warranty, and both cover the traction battery for eight years or 160,000km. That is a genuine dead heat, and it is not the tie people expect when a Chinese newcomer meets a long-established Japanese brand.

Zeekr goes one better on two counts. Its warranty policy states an explicit battery health floor: if state of health drops below 70 percent of original capacity inside those eight years, Zeekr repairs, replaces or reconditions the pack free of charge, and Subaru publishes no equivalent retention figure. Roadside assistance also runs five years on the Zeekr against twelve months on the Subaru. Read the fine print though: Zeekr's unlimited-kilometre term is for private vehicles, and rideshare, rental, taxi, courier and tour use drops to 200,000km.

Servicing is where Subaru puts distance between them, and it is the most concrete win on this page. The Solterra runs 12-month or 15,000km intervals under a published 5-year / 75,000km capped-price program:

That is $984.18 across five years and 75,000km, GST included, published in advance and honoured at any participating Subaru retailer. Zeekr Australia's service page publishes no capped-price schedule and no per-service pricing at all. It describes an authorised partner network and tells you to call them. That may well turn out cheap, but "ask us later" is not the same product as a number you can budget against before you buy.

The other thing Subaru is selling is time in market: decades here, a retailer network that already knows the cars, and a reputation earned on gravel. Zeekr only launched the 7X in Australia in September 2025. Its first year has gone extremely well, including a five-star ANCAP result out of the box and a Drive Car of the Year segment win, but three years of resale history is not something a good debut can buy. If you are weighing what either car is worth when you sell it, our depreciation calculator is the place to put honest numbers on that rather than guessing.