New Cars Launched in the UAE in 2026

Dubai, 17 August 2026

Roughly two dozen new cars have gone on sale in the UAE since February, and the year has an obvious shape. February did most of the work, March to May went almost silent, and nearly everything that has landed since June is electric or plug-in hybrid. If you are car shopping right now, three of them matter more than the rest: the new Toyota RAV4, the Cadillac VISTIQ and the Tesla Model Y L. Here is the full list, what each one costs, and which ones change what you should pay for the car you were already looking at.

Every car that launched in the UAE this year

February did most of the year’s work

Ten of these cars went on sale in a single month. Some of that is the calendar — brands like to land a launch before Ramadan, which began around 18 February this year — and some of it is Toyota, which put the new RAV4, the GR Corolla and the GR Yaris on sale inside the same week.

The February cars are also the affordable ones. Every car here under AED 150,000 arrived in February, and four of the ten are hybrids or plug-in hybrids priced against ordinary petrol crossovers rather than against other electric cars. The Geely EX5 EM-i is the clearest example: a plug-in hybrid crossover at around AED 90,000 before VAT, which is Corolla Cross money.

Then the market went quiet until June

March produced two launches. April produced two. May produced none that we can verify at all. That gap is real rather than a reporting hole, and it lines up with a sharp drop in UAE dealership activity earlier in the year that the trade press has since reported as recovering to normal by June.

What restarted in June looks different from February. Almost everything since is electric or plug-in hybrid, and the prices are higher: the Zeekr 9X, the Tesla Model Y L, the Cadillac VISTIQ and the BMW iX3 are all cars for someone spending over AED 200,000.

Chinese brands launched more cars than anyone else

Count them up and the split is not close. Geely, iCAUR, GWM, SOUEAST, Chery, BYD, MHERO, Kaiyi, XPENG and Zeekr account for more than half the list. The German, Japanese and American brands between them managed nine.

Two of those names did not sell cars here at all a year ago. iCAUR opened with a launch gala in Dubai in February and now has showrooms in three emirates. MHERO signed its UAE distribution deal in February and had its second model on sale by the end of June.

This matters for anyone buying used, and not in an obvious way. A brand that is two years old here has no meaningful used market yet, so there is no second-hand price to check a new one against. That cuts both ways: no bargain to find, but also no way to see how well the car holds its value before you commit.

Five of these cars still have no UAE price

The Geely Coolray facelift, the Audi Q3, the Chery Tiggo 8 CSH, the MG GT and the Suzuki Across all went on sale months ago without the brand or its distributor publishing an official UAE price list. The Lotus Emira 420 Sport, on sale for pre-order since early August, is in the same position.

You will find numbers for all of them online. Be careful with those numbers. When we checked, the sites carrying prices for cars whose makers have not published one were also carrying a Kia Niro at AED 8.79 million and a Mitsubishi Pajero at AED 877,745. If a price for one of these six cars matters to your decision, the only reliable source is the showroom.

What a new launch does to the car you were about to buy

A new generation arriving is the single most predictable thing that happens to a used car’s value. The old shape stops being the current car, and everyone who wanted new has a reason to trade in. Supply goes up and asking prices come down, usually over the following six to nine months rather than overnight.

On this year’s list, the RAV4 is the one that affects the most people. It is the highest-volume car of the group by a wide margin, and the previous generation is one of the most common family crossovers on UAE roads. If you have been looking at a three or four-year-old RAV4, you are shopping at a better moment now than you were in January.

The Lexus IS350 facelift works the same way at a higher price. The Cadillac Escalade IQ and the VISTIQ do not, yet — they are electric cars with almost no used supply behind them, so there is nothing for them to push down.

The opposite trap is worth naming too. A brand-new nameplate with no history here — the Ti 7, the MHERO 2, the V27, the P7+ — takes the steepest hit in its first two or three years, because nobody knows what it will be worth and buyers price that uncertainty in. If you are buying one new, buy it because you want it for a while, not as something to flip.

How we checked these prices

Every price in the table above comes from the brand, its UAE distributor, or a dated report from an established motoring title. Where a car went on sale without an official price, we have written “price unconfirmed” and left it there rather than publishing an estimate. We have not converted a price from another market, carried one over from a previous model year, or rounded one up into a guess.

We also removed several cars that are widely listed as 2026 UAE launches but are not. The Jaecoo J5 went on sale here in August 2025, the Jaecoo J8 in 2024, and the Haval H9 in December 2024. The Hongqi Guoya was shown in Abu Dhabi in December 2025 and still has no confirmed UAE price. The Freelander 8, the Nissan Tekton, the new Mercedes GLA and the next Mitsubishi Pajero have all been revealed but are not on sale here yet.

If you spot something we have missed or got wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

Looking at one of the outgoing models on this list? That is usually the smart end of the market — a car one generation behind, with the new one’s arrival already in the price. Browse inspection-verified used cars on CarSwitch and check what the outgoing version is actually selling for before you decide between new and used.