GWM Poer300 Review & Prices

The GWM Poer300 is a new pickup truck that provides seriously strong value. It undercuts the alternatives by several thousand pounds - which makes a big difference after 2025’s changes to company car tax for pickup truck drivers. It won’t suit the image-conscious, but it makes an ideal - and well-specified - working vehicle.

The Poer300 - pronounced ‘Power’, not poo-er or poe-er - is the product of Great Wall Motors, better-known in the UK for selling the Funky Cat electric car (now known as the Ora 03). GWM had a brief run in the 2010s selling the Steed pickup, which wasn’t terribly successful, but the Poer300 is a much more convincing offering.

If Toyota, Isuzu and KGM are all turning up to a picnic with basic sausage rolls, GWM is the person from down the street who swoops in with super-fancy pork pies just to show off. It’s these three manufacturers that build the closest alternatives in the form of the Hilux, D-Max and Musso - vehicles intended more as working trucks than the expensive and luxurious Ford Ranger or VW Amarok.

The Poer300 has big, beefy and intimidating styling. The front grille is chunky, with a big chrome badge that’s different from GWM’s corporate logo - it’s meant to be a stylised ‘P’ for ‘Poer’, though it looks more like a Q to us. Round the rear the GWM logo is neatly embossed into the tailgate, but the rest is pretty anonymous - from some angles, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a Nissan Navara or previous-gen Ford Ranger.

LED lights all-round come as standard, though, giving the Poer a premium-looking leg up on other cheap pickups. That posh veneer continues on the inside, where leather trim is standard and the modern dash features a big touchscreen and standard digital instrument display.

The standard equipment list is very generous on all variants, with mid-spec Ultra at less than £35,000 comfortably out-gunning a £50,000 Ford Ranger on the spec front.

It stacks up well as a working vehicle, too. The payload is over a tonne (essential for VAT reclamation) and the load bed is larger than all but the extra-long KGM Musso. It can also tow 3,500kg, and some nice touches include the gas struts for the tailgate and even a foldout step on upper models.

The Poer300’s 2.4-litre diesel is powerful, quiet and by the standards of the class even quite efficient. It’s paired as standard to a nine-speed auto - most alternatives are manual as standard, and their autoboxes are old-fashioned six-speed varieties.

It’s even perfectly fine to drive. If you’re used to an SUV, you’ll find it jiggly over bumps and wayward in the corners - but compared with other cheap pickups it’s more than good enough. Plus, it’ll off-road as well as any of them, with an automatic four-wheel drive system that takes the guesswork out of it.

The GWM Poer300 isn’t going to replace a fully decked out Ford Ranger or VW Amarok - but if you’re looking for a pickup that’ll take on some serious hard work, and you don’t give a stuff about image - then this is a fantastic option.

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Pricing is now much more important in the world of pickup trucks, since all but the most basic were declassified as working vehicles and pay the standard rates of company car tax. That means that the Poer300’s price tag of £31,495 (ex. VAT) has the potential to save you a decent chunk over the closest D-Max, Musso or Hilux.

That’s for a Lux model, which still comes with plenty of kit - 12.3-inch infotainment display, climate control, auto lights and wipers, artificial leather upholstery and a wireless phone charger to name a few. The Ultra comes in at £34,830 but does add heated, ventilated and power-adjustable seats in genuine leather, plus a 360-degree camera, ambient lighting and a few extra features in the load bed. The range-topping Vanta costs another £2,000 and only adds black trim - a bit pointless.

Beefy diesel engine is well up to the job of moving the Poer300 around, but the gearbox is a bit hesitant

The GWM Poer300 has just one engine - a 2.4-litre diesel producing 184hp and 480Nm of torque. Those are strong numbers easily up there with the alternatives - the Hilux is slightly more powerful and torquey, but only by a little bit. Despite this, GWM claims class-leading fuel economy and CO2 figures too - more on those later.

The engine definitely has enough grunt to make swift progress. It’s paired up to a standard nine-speed automatic gearbox - all the alternatives are manual as standard, and most have an old-fashioned six-speed auto available as an option. The Poer300’s gearbox is smooth when you’re underway and generally pretty unobtrusive, the exception is when you’re trying to pull out at a junction where it can sometimes be overly hesitant.

On-road, the Poer300 drives much like a regular pickup - if you’re coming to it from a modern SUV, you’ll be disappointed, but it’s broadly in line with alternatives. It rattles over bumps and has quite a lot of side-to-side shake, but it does smooth out on the motorway. A Ford Ranger is much more comfortable, but we’d much rather drive the Poer300 long-distance than we would a KGM Musso, for example.

It’s also pretty good off-road. The four-wheel drive system is automatic, so if it detects slip then the front wheels will kick in by themselves - in the D-Max, Hilux or Musso, you have to stop and switch into 4WD manually. When fitted with off-road tyres, the Poer300 is excellent on the rough stuff.

Only one double-cab body style, but an impressively big load bed and some nice touches

The GWM Poer300 comes exclusively as a double-cab pickup truck in the UK - there’s no single or extended cab model. That means all versions have the same dimensions - as well as the same impressively proportioned load bed.

The bed has some nice features but key to its appeal is its depth - if you combine it with a load cover or hardtop there’ll be plenty of height, more than in any alternative. Gas struts for the tailgate are standard, which is a nice touch, and if you go for the mid-spec Ultra model you also get an integrated step that folds down from the lowered tailgate. It’s a really cool touch and makes it much easier to climb into the back if you need to unload.

GWM Poer300 internal and external measurements

Exterior dimensions

Length: 5,416mm
Width: 1,947mm
Height: 1,884mm

Internal dimensions

Load bed length: 1,520mm
Load bed width: 1,520mm
Load bed height: 540mm

Towing capacity

All versions can tow the legal maximum of 3,500kg. Gross train weight is 6,200kg, so it can’t quite manage a full payload while towing like the KGM Musso - but you can still legally carry around 400kg, which isn’t bad.

The Poer300 behaves very well when towing, too. We took our 1,500kg trailer on the motorway as well as rural roads. The truck feels stable, and even when the trailer tugged at the rear in crosswinds it didn’t feel unsettled.

Payload

All versions of the Poer300 get a payload of 1,050kg - par for the course in the class and crucially, over the 1,000kg threshold to reclaim VAT as a business purchase.

Modern cab is comfortable but has a few usability niggles

The GWM Poer300’s interior is impressively car-like in both design and construction. Though it does use plenty of cheap, hardwearing materials lower down, there’s a nice swathe of artificial leather trim as well as a genuinely stylish backlit portion with the outline of the truck. The grille logo being mirrored in the steering wheel boss is also a neat touch.

The plethora of physical buttons in its alternatives are replaced here with a 12.3-inch touchscreen infotainment system. It sits high up on the dash and is bright and clear, with good graphics. It’s not the easiest to use - turning off some of the safety systems requires a degree - but it’s miles more appealing than the pokey, outdated systems in the alternatives.

While sat-nav isn’t built-in, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto both are, so you can easily connect your phone up. There’s also a standard wireless charging pad, and it’s even cooled, though USB-A and USB-C ports are also provided as contingency.

The door bins and glovebox aren’t the largest, but the cupholders and under-armrest storage are both decent, so you shouldn’t be struggling for places to put stuff. The useful upper gloveboxes on a Hilux or a D-Max are missed here, though.

With artificial or real leather upholstery on all models, it feels more luxurious than perhaps it should. Certainly an Isuzu D-Max feels like it’ll weather a hard day’s work on the farm a bit better - and its physical switchgear will be easier pressed by people wearing gloves. The Poer300’s is nicer for daily driving, though.

The rear seats offer a decent level of legroom but the floor and seatbase are both very high - headroom is limited plus you feel as if you’re sitting with your knees round your ears. There are ISOFIX points on the two outer rear seats, though, so they’re ideal for children. And if you’re carrying objects rather than people, the bases tip upright for tall items, or fold-down flat.

The Poer300 claims an official fuel economy figure of 32.7mpg - that’s already better than all of its alternatives. More impressively, over a week with the truck - which included motorway runs, lots of city driving and even some towing - we averaged 33mpg. Combined with the 75-litre fuel tank, that means a driving range of around 540 miles.

Company car tax for pickups used to be a flat rate, but since April 2025 it’s been based on list price and CO2 emissions just like a passenger car. This is where the Poer300 plays its trump card - as it’s cheaper than alternatives. That means company car tax bills are also lower. If your sole concern with a pickup is its cost and capability, that makes the sums on the GWM work very favourably.

Road tax is the same as all pickups, at a fixed rate of £345.

The Poer300 hasn’t been tested by Euro NCAP, but in Australia the equivalent - ANCAP - awarded it a five-star rating. It comes with plenty of safety systems as standard, too - there’s autonomous emergency braking, lane-keeping aids, driver monitoring and plenty of airbags. The more annoying of these systems can be disabled from the screen, and you can even set the shortcut button on the steering wheel to take you there - but you’ll still need to spend some time fiddling about in the menu to do so.

Rear parking sensors and a reversing camera are standard while a 360-degree system is provided with the mid-spec model. A Thatcham-approved alarm and immobiliser are standard kit too.

It’s a new truck from a newish brand, but signs are quite good for the Poer300. It’s immensely popular in Australia, and that’s a market that simply won’t tolerate unreliable vehicles.

The warranty is a reassuring five years and 125,000 miles - shorter in time but longer in mileage terms than alternative offerings. And GWM has a wide range of service centres dotted around the country. Service intervals are every year or 12,000 miles, which is on par with the competition too.