Chery Tiggo 9 review

Flagship for Chinese brand is a big, seven-seat SUV with the longest electric-only range of any PHEV on sale

Chinese car brand Chery - self-proclaimed maker of ‘happy cars’ - has thus far brought us a model range populated entirely by SUVs. That’s because - and for understandable reasons - it elected to launch its Tiggo sub-brand in Europe in advance of any others (it offers a number of saloons in China under the Arrizo sub-brand and a pick-up truck called, somewhat awkwardly, the Himla).

So now for more of the same. The most wonderful Tiggo of them all, no less: the range-topping Chery Tiggo 9. This is a big, seven-seat family SUV that’s ready to make the likes of the Honda CR-V, Hyundai Santa Fe and even the Skoda Kodiaq look distinctly overpriced.

Spoiler alert, Disney fans: this car is neither bouncy nor especially fun, fun, fun, fun, fun – but if you want a cost-effective route into a super-practical plug-hybrid, don’t overlook it on those accounts.

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DESIGN & STYLING

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At 4.8m long and 1.74m tall, the Tiggo 9 is just a little bit smaller than the Hyundai Santa Fe but bigger than the Peugeot 5008. 

It has the heft of a flagship, no doubt, if perhaps not the visual presence. Instead, while neat and tidy enough, it’s predictably derivative and a bit bland to behold. Not the kind of car you would point at and wonder which lucky soul might be travelling inside.

This car looks as if Chery just copied the old Hyundai Santa Fe, smoothed out the surfaces and added 2025’s obligatory rear light bar. It’s as if the brand is actively catering for people who hope that nobody will notice what they drive.
Matt Saunders
Road test editor

It uses the same T1X platform as all the rest of the Chery, Omoda and Jaecoo models we’ve seen thus far but stretches it in various notional ways. The cabin feels significantly wider than that of the Tiggo 7 or Jaecoo 7, for one, and its PHEV powertrain differs quite widely from a technical point of view.

The Tiggo 9 comes exclusively as a tri-motor, four-wheel-drive PHEV. In addition to the 121bhp gearbox-mounted starter-generator that the 1.5-litre turbocharged petrol engine most often drives into, then, are a 101bhp permanent magnet synchronous motor for the front axle and 235bhp one for the rear.

Via a clever three-speed hybrid transmission, the engine can also drive the front wheels. And so at full system power, some 423bhp and 428lb ft of torque can find its way to the road, sending this 2.2-tonne SUV to 62mph from rest in a Honda Civic Type R-levelling 5.4sec.

Providing the reserves for those motors is a nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) battery that is a little over a metre in both length and width; is about seven inches thick; weighs a little over 200kg; is carried under the cabin floor; and has a total nominal capacity of 34.4kWh (the Honda CR-V PHEV’s battery is literally half the size). It can also be DC rapid-charged, should you want to – something plenty of other PHEVs fail to offer.

INTERIOR

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Only the uppermost Summit trim level will be offered to UK customers, so it’s all massaging ‘eco leather’ seats, 20in wheels, laminated side windows and 14-speaker stereo with speakers in the front headrests. 

The Tiggo 9 is a full-size seven-seater even accounting for its PHEV components (the likes of the Skoda Kodiaq and Volkswagen Tayron can’t be had as seven-seat PHEVs).

There are Isofix anchors on the outer second-row seats, which slide and tilt forwards, if a little stubbornly, to reveal a third row.

Room in row two is entirely adult-appropriate; in row three it’s a class-typical sort of situation, suited to smaller travellers only but usable nevertheless.

Up front, the general standard on material quality is no better than in the Tiggo 7 or Tiggo 8. There’s an awful lot of shiny plastic to survey and many of the fittings are too flimsy and cheap to lend any kind of convincing premium feel.

But then there aren’t many physical switches anyway, with a 15.6in touchscreen system standing in for a physical heater console, proper door mirror adjusters, regenerative braking controls and even a starter button.

It’s bright and crisp, although a good chunk of it is hidden behind the steering wheel rim, so you have to crane your neck to see it, and the usability of it is poor. Expect lots of sub-menus and list-scrolling and no easy way to jump in and out of smartphone mirroring (Apple CarPlay fills the whole screen). 

Also expect various other bits of unintuitive, software-related oddities. An economy computer that gives you efficiency in three different ways, none of which you can actually reset; ADAS and driver monitoring toggles that don’t all appear in the same place; and a factory sat-nav system that doesn’t work without messing around with your phone and a QR code. Sorry, did someone say this was supposed to be a happy car?

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

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To be fair, if you can get over the worst of the digital tech, you might be getting there. As we’ve already explained, this car’s healthy 423bhp of peak power and 91 miles of official electric range, both have the potential to leave you rather impressed. Most cars of this kind cost about £10,000 more and deliver about half as much on both of those respects.

The Tiggo 9 drives very much like an EV at low and medium speeds, with lots of electric-only performance (it could really do with some regen paddles to complete the impression and boost drivability). Our testing suggested that, on a mixed route, you might get 85-90% of that whopping electric range claim in the real world. Still more than 75 miles of EV running, then, unless you spend all of your time on the motorway. 

If you do that, it’s best to use the Smart powertrain mode, in which it decides for itself the most efficient way to power the wheels. 

In hybrid running, the engine is remarkably quiet. Even when you use plenty of power, it still seems like a background generator, rather than like it’s needed to drive the wheels, and there’s always plenty of instant pedal response, because of the electric motors.

Brake pedal progression is decent enough at higher prevailing speeds but becomes annoyingly grabby at walking pace, when the car has to decide for itself how much friction braking to blend in and doesn’t always seem to be certain about its response.

RIDE & HANDLING

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The Tiggo 9’s chassis produces quite good body control for a car this size and weight, accurate if unenticing steering and a fairly smooth ride that suffers at times from a bit of a sense of fiddling under-isolation but generally meets a decent standard.

This is a heavy car to be running on steel coils and conventional dampers, but it does have independent suspension all round - and although it certainly feels its size and weight on the road, it doesn’t heave or wallow out of town. Chery claims to have given it specific European-market tuning out of its technical centre in Germany, and that would seem to have paid off at least modestly well. It retains decent outright body control, balanced grip levels and handling that's both predictable and secure.

If the car has a weakness, it’s probably ride isolation – something you would hope a big car would treat as a priority, but that can be an expensive challenge to engineer in. Road noise is typically fairly well suppressed on smooth asphalt, although the wheels and axles become a little bit excitable over rougher stretches, when the ride develops a sense of hollowness.

MPG & RUNNING COSTS

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Nothing, not even the particularly irksome driver monitoring system (sorry, have I been distracted again by your especially distracting omnipotent touchscreen system?) or the low-rent feel of the interior in places, takes away from the value angle here. This is a big, seven-seat PHEV with exceptional performance and charging credentials that costs less than the cheapest mild-hybrid Range Rover Evoque.

Although the offers in question weren’t in place on its website at the time of writing, Chery has shown itself well capable of providing attractive personal finance deals on its various other models. After a typical deposit, this is a lot of car to be available from the likely £500-a-month marker.

Chery’s UK dealer network, meanwhile, is already more than 30 outlets strong, with a plan to expand to 100 in 2026. It supports the Tiggo 9 with a year’s free breakdown cover, a seven-year/100,000-mile warranty and an eight-year warranty specific to the powertrain.

The car’s electric range has the potential to save a lot of money for people able to charge cheaply at home or work (DC rapid charging is possible at up to 71kW). Running in charge-depleted mode, our test car returned a little better than the 40.9mpg that the WLTP lab tests rate it for.

VERDICT

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Like its smaller siblings, the Tiggo 9 is here to appeal in simple value terms. It costs what a big, seven-seat family SUV used to about a decade ago – and, let’s face it, it hasn’t been a cheap decade. And it throws in the kind of long-range, high-performance PHEV system that you would expect a European brand to charge a 20% premium for.

Other than perhaps on ideological grounds, that’s the kind of pecuniary argument that you might find it hard to argue with. If big, versatile, efficient family transport is what you need, you would probably forgive plenty to get a car like this at this price – and honestly, there isn’t that much to forgive here.

The Tiggo 9 has an interior annoyingly spare of permanent fixed switchgear and a touchscreen system that wants too much of your attention and isn’t easy to navigate. It has some odd digital features, while its physical ones don’t have the substantial material look and feel you might expect of a big SUV. But it performs strongly, delivers the electric–only usability it promises to and rides and handles passably well.

A second acquaintance and a full road test will be necessary before we can give a proper verdict and star rating, but this is a car whose positioning is so straightforward and clear that you might feel that detailed scrutiny of it is something of a formality.

Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders Autocar
Title: Road test editor

As Autocar’s chief car tester and reviewer, it’s Matt’s job to ensure the quality, objectivity, relevance and rigour of the entirety of Autocar’s reviews output, as well contributing a great many detailed road tests, group tests and drive reviews himself.

Matt has been an Autocar staffer since the autumn of 2003, and has been lucky enough to work alongside some of the magazine’s best-known writers and contributors over that time. He served as staff writer, features editor, assistant editor and digital editor, before joining the road test desk in 2011.

Since then he’s driven, measured, lap-timed, figured, and reported on cars as varied as the Bugatti Veyron, Rolls-Royce Phantom, Tesla Roadster, Ariel Hipercar, Tata Nano, McLaren Senna, Renault Twizy and Toyota Mirai. Among his wider personal highlights of the job have been covering Sebastien Loeb’s record-breaking run at Pikes Peak in 2013; doing 190mph on derestricted German autobahn in a Brabus Rocket; and driving McLaren’s legendary ‘XP5’ F1 prototype. His own car is a trusty Mazda CX-5.