Chery Tiggo 9 Review 2025 | Chinese brand's seven-seater flagship

What is the Chery Tiggo 9?

It’s no secret that the UK’s car market is currently experiencing a large influx of new Chinese brands, aiming to chance their arm in Europe and disrupt the strangle-hold held by more established mainstream marques. Chery is just such a brand, and although it’s new in the UK, this is no random fly-by-night start-up.

Chery International has been going in China since 1997, and so has plenty of form in building cars, and is currently that country’s largest exporter of new cars. It uses various brand names around the world to peddle its wares, and you may already be familiar with a couple of them, Omoda and Jaecoo, which landed in the UK in late 2024 and early 2025, respectively. A third Chery International brand, known simply as Chery, has now joined the UK party, and while Omoda and Jaecoo aim to provide a prestige, aspirational experience, Chery is more a competitor for mainstream brands such as Ford, Peugeot, Kia and Hyundai.

The Chery Tiggo 9 we’re talking about here is the firm’s third model offering in the UK after the Tiggo 7 and Tiggo 8 SUVs, and also represents the brand’s flagship. It’s a large seven-seater family SUV that’s offered in a single super-high-spec trim level, and exclusively with a plug-in hybrid powertrain that promises huge performance with the potential of minuscule running costs thanks to its impressive electric-only range of up to 91 miles.

In terms of the competition, Chery has mainstream seven-seater PHEV SUV rivals such as the Peugeot 5008, Kia Sorento, and Hyundai Santa Fe firmly within its sights for the Tiggo 9, and it also wouldn’t mind nicking a few sales from premium competitors such as the Volvo XC90 if at all possible. Bear in mind, however, that the Tiggo 9 promises to provide more luxury features and tech as standard than any rival, while also costing much, much less. As we’ll find out, though, the exception to that rule is Chery’s own Tiggo 8, which has a very similar set of abilities, along with an even lower pricetag.

How practical is it?

The Tiggo 9 is the second seven-seater in Chery’s UK model line-up behind the Tiggo 8. However, although Chery makes much noise about the Tiggo 9 being the brand’s new flagship, it’s hardly any bigger than the Tiggo 8: at 4,810mm in length, its advantage in length is just 8.5 centimetres. And that means it has very little advantage in overall practicality, despite being considerably more expensive.

Like its slightly smaller stablemate, though, it does an entirely decent job when judged in isolation. The front seats have all the space you could want, plus there’s standard electric adjustment for both the seats and the steering wheel, so finding a comfortable driving position is quick and easy, although some drivers might wish for a shade more range of movement in the steering adjustment. Storage is good up front, too, with cubbies and pockets dotted around all over the place, while visibility all around the car is clear and largely unimpeded.

Move to the second row of seats, and you’ll find plenty of headroom and legroom, enough for tall passengers to lounge about in comfort. The cabin also feels wide enough that carrying three adults across the second row shouldn’t be out of the question.

The middle row of seats is split 60/40, and each portion can be reclined, folded, and slid backwards and forwards on runners. The third-row seats, meanwhile, pop up out of the boot floor.

To fit anyone - even small kids - into the third-row seats, you’ll need to slide the middle-row seats forward because otherwise there’s virtually no legroom. Sliding those middle seats to the forwardmost point of their runners will leave their occupants without sufficient legroom - their knees will be pressing uncomfortably into the backs of the front seats - but with the middle-row seats set to around the halfway point of their runners, there should be just about enough room for an adult to travel reasonably comfortably in every one of the car’s seven seats. If you’re six foot or above, though, you’ll find headroom tight in the rearmost row.

Getting into the rearmost row in the first place is easier said than done, too. Pull a catch on the outer middle seat, and it slides, tips and raises out of your way, but the gap you’re left to climb through is still pretty small and knowing where to put your feet as you go is tricky. What’s more, this access mechanism is only provided on the right-hand side of the car, so if you try to get in from the left, it’s even more difficult. Having said that, hampered access to third-row seats isn’t exactly a rarity in the seven-seater SUV market.

All in all, the cabin space in the Tiggo 9 feels barely any different than in the Tiggo 8, and it’s also very close to rivals such as the Nissan X-Trail, while a Skoda Kodiaq feels a wee bit roomier generally.

Obviously, the boot space you get depends on how many seats are in use at any one time. With all seven chairs in place, the Tiggo 9 gives you a modest-but-acceptable volume of 143 litres: this is a marginal 26-litre improvement over the equivalent figure of 117 litres that the Tiggo 8 gives you, but you now see what we meant when we said that the 9’s practicality advantage was small.

With five seats in place, the quoted cargo figure is 819 litres, although looking at the space you get, we strongly suspect that this is measured right up to the roof, rather than up to a load cover as is more conventional. Use the car in two-seat mode, and you’ll get a maximum cargo-carrying capacity of 2021 litres. All of the folded seats lie at a slight angle, so there’s a gentle slope to your extended load area, but they do at least lie level with each other, so there are no awkward steps to get in your way.

What you’ll probably like most about the interior, though, is its quality. There are plenty of nice, squidgy soft-touch panels right in front of you, and some genuinely pleasant (and plausible) dark wood inserts, while the vegan-leather upholstery does a very reasonable impression of the real thing. There are a few piano black panels and flashes of fake metal trim, but not so many as to make the car feel too chintzy, and it all looks impressively stylish. The plastics get harder and less tactile as you look further down into the footwells of the car, but even these are textured in such a way that they look okay.

What’s it like to drive?

The Chery Tiggo 9 is offered with just one powertrain, a plug-in hybrid system that brings together a 1.5-litre turbocharged petrol, twin electric motors (one on each axle), a 34kWh battery pack and a three-speed automatic gearbox. With all the various power sources firing at their maximum, a total of 422bhp is produced, which according to official figures, can propel this two-and-a-bit-tonne SUV from 0-62mph in just 5.4 seconds. Those same official figures also proclaim an impressive-sounding electric-only range of up to 91 miles.

And sure enough, the powertrain works pretty well. There are various driving modes, including Eco, Normal and Sport, and while the power you’re given in each doesn’t vary, the eagerness with which it’s served up does change.

Whatever mode you select, the initial throttle response is quite slow, so there’s a distinct pause between the pedal being pressed and the car reacting. In Eco mode, that reaction is gentle and measured, but brisk enough to get you around with purpose. In Sport mode, meanwhile, that initial lull is followed by a pretty rampant surge of forward motion: the sensation is a bit odd, but there’s certainly no doubting that once it’s up and running, this car is very brisk indeed, and it’s still quick to accelerate even when you’re already going at a fair old lick. We reckon Normal mode is the one to stick with: it feels generally keener than Eco mode, but the rate of acceleration is dialled back enough compared with Sport mode that the power delivery doesn’t feel quite so Jekyll-and-Hyde due to the lazy initial throttle response.

Whatever the mode or your speed of travel, the powertrain works smoothly, juggling the various power sources largely imperceptibly. Most of the time, you’ll only know that the petrol engine has cut in if the central screen tells you so (and you have to have the correct display up for that), and even when it’s working really hard, it never gets loud. Wind- and road noise are pretty well suppressed, too, so this is an impressively quiet and relaxed way to get around.

The suspension contributes to this relaxed demeanour, too. It’s pretty soft, and it does a really good job of smoothing over large lumps and bumps in the road. Part of our test drive route took in some really horrible stretches of grainy and rutted Tarmac, and the car dealt admirably with the vast majority of what was thrown at it. Okay, the ride isn’t flawless: it occasionally gets caught out by a bump that you’d think it’d deal with easily, but your life stays nice and comfortable most of the time.

Granted, the softness of the suspension does mean that the handling has a rather roly-poly feel, but it’s nothing that’s unreasonable or unsettling, and the car always feels secure and under control. Besides, in a car like the Tiggo 9, we’d take ride comfort over handling precision any day of the week.

The steering feels rather artificial, but at least it’s decently weighted and consistent. You might not be quite so tolerant of the brakes, though, which are over-sensitive and slightly grabby, and they take some getting used to.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

Being the flagship of the Chery line-up, the Tiggo 9 comes in a single generously specced trim level that comes with pretty much everything as standard, and the only optional extra it’s possible to add is your paint colour.

Standard luxury kit includes the following (ahem!): 20-inch alloy wheels, all-LED exterior lighting, automatic lights and wipers, heated windscreen, vegan-leather upholstery, ambient lighting, heated steering wheel with power adjustment, power-adjusting front seats with massage function, heating and ventilation for the front seats and middle row seats, dual-zone climate control, powered tailgate, privacy glass, panoramic sunroof with powered sunshade, all-round parking sensors, a 540-degree camera system (this gives you a view underneath the car as well as all around it), and adaptive cruise control.

That’s not including all the various safety and driver assistance tech on board which we’ll go into in the ‘Three things to know section’, if only just to give us all a break from endless lists of features.

The standard infotainment system is as comprehensive as you’d expect, with a 14-speaker Sony sound system, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, wireless phone charging, and a ’Hello Chery’ virtual assistant. That last item is about as useful and effective as we’ve come to expect from such systems: in other words, not.

Like with most new cars these days, the vast majority of all that fancy kit is operated through the car’s central touchscreen, which in this case is a large 15.6-inch unit plopped slap-bang in the middle of the dashboard. It looks good, with sharp and stylish graphics, slick screen transitions and clearly designed on-screen icons for the home screen that are large enough to hit at a glance.

However, with very little switchgear to be found elsewhere in the car, this screen is pretty much your only interface with the car’s myriad functions. And yes, that includes the ventilation controls, as these are integrated into the screen, irritatingly.

And with so many diverse functions to facilitate, the structure of menus and submenus is extremely long and convoluted. To be fair to the designers, these menus are actually arranged in quite a logical way, so things could be worse, but there are just so many of them, each containing a vast number of options and settings, that it’s all too easy to get lost when trying to find the setting you want. The screen sensitivity is a little iffy, too, so even when you finally find the menu item you want, you might have to jab at it several times before your command is registered.

The digital instrument screen behind the steering wheel could be better designed, too. It’s a generous size at 10.25 inches, but even so, the various bits of information displayed are presented in small, difficult-to-read text, and they’re placed around the edges of the screen, meaning that the rim of the steering wheel can sometimes obscure your view of them even more. This design becomes even more baffling once you notice the large amount of empty white space in the middle of the screen.

Chery Tiggo 9 running costs

The headline here is certainly the Tiggo 9’s purchase price. At the time of writing, shortly before the car’s UK on-sale date, the list price stands at £43,105. Next to more established seven-seat SUV rivals, this looks like incredible value.

Let’s put a bit of context behind that. At first, a Skoda Kodiaq doesn’t look too far off on price, but then you realise that the PHEV version can’t be had with seven seats, so it’s not a like-for-like competitor. A top-spec PHEV version of the Peugeot 5008 costs around £47,000, meanwhile, but it’s a long way down on both power and equipment compared with the Chery.

A top-spec PHEV version of the Kia Sorento is closer on both kit and power, although still behind the Chery, but costs around £56,000. You’ll be looking at more like £58,000 for the equivalent Hyundai Santa Fe.

The Tiggo 9 looks fairly untouchable for value, then. And yes, it would be, were it not for the existence of the Tiggo 8. As we’ve observed, the 8 is barely any smaller or less practical than the 9, and has all the interior quality, plus a similarly easy-going driving experience. You can spec it with the same PHEV powertrain - albeit a detuned 201bhp version - and in the same high-spec Summit trim level, in which case it comes with almost as much kit. And thus-specced, the 8 costs around £36,500, around £6,500 less than the Tiggo 9. And, if you’re not bothered about having quite so much kit or a plug-in hybrid powertrain, it can be had in entry-level form from as little as £28,600 if you make do with a turbocharged petrol engine (which for clarity, we haven’t tried, so we can’t vouch for its quality).

Assuming for a moment that the Tiggo 9 ends up getting your vote regardless, then its PHEV powertrain has a very impressive all-electric range of up to 91 miles according to official WLTP figures. This at least gives you a fighting chance of completing many everyday journeys on electric-only power, provided your throttle inputs stay light enough, and your battery stays topped up. Fail on any front, and the petrol engine will fire up, at which point the car will immediately become pretty thirsty.

The corresponding combined fuel economy figure that this electric range gives stands at around 470mpg, but this figure is largely irrelevant because the official tests are unrealistically flattering to plug-in hybrids, and what you actually end up getting will depend entirely on how you use the car. Chery also quotes a real-world-adjusted figure of 40.9mpg, which we reckon is probably about right as a realistic average.

Charging you battery on a regular 7kW home wallbox charger will cost around £9, assuming you pay for your domestic electricity at the UK’s national average rate, but you can cut that in half (maybe more) if you have a variable power tariff that allows you to charge overnight on vastly discounted off-peak power. Either way, it’ll take a little over five hours.

The Tiggo 9’s maximum DC charging speed of 71kW is very good by PHEV standards, and allows a 30% to 80% top-up to be delivered in 18 minutes, although charging this way will be way, way more expensive.

PHEVs no longer earn you any kind of relief on VED road tax, and because the list price of the Tiggo 9 is more than £40,000, you’ll also be stung for the ‘luxury car surcharge’. As a result, on top of the annual flat rate of £195 per year, you’ll also pay an additional £425 per year between years two and six of the car’s life, taking your annual outlay for that period to £620. Insurance premiums won’t be cheap, either, the Tiggo 9 sitting in group 44 out of 50.

Chery Tiggo 9 reliability

Chery, along with its Omoda and Jaecoo muckers, haven’t been operating in the UK for long enough for any meaningful data on their reliability to be available. So, buying one involves taking a bit of a leap of faith when it comes to reliability.

You may be comforted to learn that Chery provides a seven-year, 100,000-mile warranty with all its new cars, which should help to bring a bit of peace of mind.

However, we’d advise being a bit careful here. We’ve had a delve into the Ts and Cs of Chery’s warranty, and we’ve found that the cover on a list of certain items quietly expires after a mere three years or 40,000 miles. This in itself isn’t unusual, and the same often happens with the warranty of other manufacturers. With Chery’s cover, though, the list in question is eyebrow-raisingly long, and there are some properly big-ticket items on it, items that you really would expect to be covered for longer.