► Tiggo 9 is a new seven-seater SUV
► ‘Self-charging’ plug-in Super Hybrid
► 422bhp for just over £43k
The opening line of the Chery Tiggo 9 CSH pricing and spec press release says this car’s arrival ‘marks the beginning of a new flagship era for Chery in the UK’. The Chinese brand only entered the UK market under its own name in August 2025 – so that’s either mad spin or a statement of seriously aggressive intent.
Having looked at said pricing and spec of this new seven-seater plug-in hybrid SUV, we’re inclined towards the latter.
Offered in a single flagship Summit trim level, the Tiggo 9 is so rammed with standard kit it’s almost astonishing it can still move. Yet priced at £43,105, this new Chery significantly undercuts the seven-seater PHEV competition – both the equivalent Hyundai Santa Fe and Mazda CX-80 top £50k, and you’ll still need to spend £47,240 to get the most basic plug-in Kia Sorento. Neither VW nor Skoda makes a seven-seater plug-in hybrid.
Whether you really want a Tiggo 9 or not will come down to the driving, but on paper at least this has got our attention.
Inevitably the parent brand behind Jaecoo and Omoda was going to come hard on the equipment front. So we’ll come back to that in the moment. For now, let’s consider the powertrain.
The Tiggo 9 gets the CSH naming addendum because it stands for Chery Super Hybrid, denoting what the firm modestly describes as a ‘world class’ effort at hybridisation. Hitting all the buzzwords, Chery says it’s both ‘self-charging’ and a plug-in model – but that’s the same for most PHEVs and it’s surely going to take a little more than a quick trip around the block to replenish the 34.46kWh battery pack. No matter how ‘state-of-the-art’ it is.
This is where things start to get a little more interesting, though, as the battery is built using CATL’s M3P materials system – a development beyond LFP that’s said to be more energy dense and cheaper to produce. Powering twin electric motors, the result is a claimed 91 miles of electric-only WLTP driving range as well as four-wheel drive.
Stack up that EV range with the petrol tank fuelling the 1.5-litre turbo under the bonnet, and you’ve got a large SUV Chery claims will do 650 miles between stops. As well as one that produces 422bhp and 428lb ft, and lunges do 0-62mph in 5.4sec. The transmission is a three-speed automatic.
The battery also supports DC charging (capped at 71kw, this takes 18 minutes to do 30-80 percent on a comparatively compact pack, so that’s a minor weak point), as well as 6.6kW vehicle-to-load for powering any electrical items you might be carrying.
The tech hit comes straight away with a 15.6-inch central touchscreen, plus a 10.25-inch digital instrument cluster and a head-up display. The infotainment is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chipset – making it ‘fast and fluid’ apparently – and has wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, supported by cooled 50w wireless phone charging.
The 14-speaker Sony audio system is the ‘most advanced’ ever fitted by Chery, there’s a Chery smartphone app, and a ‘Hello Chery’ Virtual Assistant that promises natural speech recognition. The dual-zone climate control has an air purification system and is self-cleaning, while the driver gets 12-way seat adjustment with heating, cooling and massaging functions. The front passenger seat ‘fully reclines’ for ‘total relaxation’.
A Pet Mode keeps the cabin cool for your favourite critters (albeit designed for use only ‘briefly’), the central seating row slides and reclines electrically, and with the third-row seats folded flat you get 819-litres of boot space. A CX-80, for reference, gives you 687 litres in the same configuration.
Other things that make us go what? include the 540 (!) degree camera system. Obviously, there’s a heated steering wheel, key-sensing powered tailgate and automatic parking. You can remote start the engine and the climate control, the glass is acoustically treated for refinement, and the list of safety acronyms is as long as your tallest mate’s arm.
Confusingly, Chery already sells a bargain-priced seven-seater plug-in hybrid called the Tiggo 8 (alongside the smaller five-seater Tiggo 7) – and this offers a perfectly acceptable driving experience. Albeit it of the soft and wallowy persuasion. The Tiggo 9 has had input from Chery’s European R&D centre and as such has been ‘fine-tuned’ for UK and European roads.
What that means in reality we’ll have to wait and see. But if you want a lot car for seven people and don’t want to pay very much for it, at this point it’s hard to see why wouldn’t at least take a nosey at one of Chery’s 25 UK showrooms. Assuming you’re not too far from one, anyway…
CJ is a former Associate Editor of CAR, and now runs parent company Bauer Media’s Digital Automotive Hub – the in-house team that provides much of the online content for CAR and sister site Parkers.co.uk as well as helping out with CAR magazine. He’s been writing about cars professionally (if that's the right word) for nearly two decades, though attempts to hide this fact with an extensive moisturising routine.
By CJ Hubbard
Head of the Bauer Digital Automotive Hub and former Associate Editor of CAR. Road tester, organiser, reporter and professional enthusiast, putting the driver first
