Chinese brand Chery plans to accelerate its remarkable growth with a pure electric car among four new models, as well as tuning its cars for British tastes. The family SUV brand, whose ambassadors include sporty figures Sir Mo Farah and Peter Crouch, entered the UK market 12 months ago, and has registered more than 29,000 cars. That just pips the volume logged by sister brand Jaecoo in its first year in Britain, powered by the budget Range Rover vibes of the Jaecoo 7. Chery benefited from third brand Omoda and Jaecoo’s spadework: they established the UK operation and caught the eye of big dealer groups, helping Chery on the path to more than 100 retailers. “The next thing is to make sure we keep growing,” said Farrell Hsu, Chery UK country manager at a London briefing. “We want to bring many electrified vehicles to the UK, including Super Hybrid and [pure] EV. We will invest more: next year you will see a new EV.” Overseas Chery offers a range of electric cars, from city runabouts to a Chery-badged version of the Omoda 5, as well as the eQ7, a swoopy midsize crossover with a 318-mile range in China. Off these off-the-shelf models, the rear-wheel drive eQ7, looks the most suitable for British introduction – though its design is more in keeping with an Omoda than Chery’s trad-looking SUVs and it was introduced three years ago. That’s an age ago by Chinese life cycle standards. But the EV could be a new model or an electrified version of an existing nameplate: expect more details at a product summit in the coming weeks. More than two-thirds of UK Cherys run its Super Hybrid, which combines an efficient turbocharged petrol engine, two motors and the firm’s in-house, three-speed automatic transmission regardless of whether the drivetrain is regular hybrid or plug-in hybrid. With prolonged electric running, the Chery Tiggo 8’s efficiency shone in Auto Express’s plug-in hybrid megatest, and Hsu is determined to build on this Chery strength. “We want to invest more in Super Hybrid and build a family,” said Hsu. The Tiggo 4 small SUV is a full hybrid with a 1.8kWh battery and 53.2mpg fuel economy, while the larger SUVs – the 7,8 and 9 – plug in to charge their 18.4 or 34.4kWh batteries. Hsu’s vision is that buying a Super Hybrid becomes like selecting the amount of storage for a new smartphone, with a wider selection of battery sizes for a greater spread of electric range and fuel economy. As part of the four new and refreshed cars, Hsu also promised an additional Tiggo model, which he coyly referred to as the Tiggo X. “The name is not decided but we will have a Tigo ‘X’ series next year. We will introduce a different shape and target different family customers.” The most obvious gap in the Tiggo portfolio is at the bottom end, with a baby SUV measuring between 4 and 4.2-metres. The ageing Tiggo 2 fulfils this role in some export markets; rival Leapmotor is also pushing into the Ford Puma segment with the B03X. Chery is also setting up a small R&D facility at the Millbrook test centre in Bedfordshire, to optimise specifications for the UK market. “We have tried to improve ourselves based on customer feedback, and we keep trying to improve the chassis tuning,” said Hsu. Intrusive driver assistance systems and infotainment operation are also under the microscope. Auto Express testers have found the Tiggo models typically too soft, with wallowy body control and imprecise steering. Hsu, who worked on suspension systems at Ford in China, is keen to act as the conduit to feed back British preferences and accelerate revisions. “This R&D center’s beginning stage is to translate the customer language to the engineering language, and tell HQ ‘This is what you need to do, you need to change [these] parameters’.” Expect the first of the sharper handling Cherys to arrive with the four-model rollout in 2027.
