Chery Tiggo 9 Review 2025

The Tiggo 9 is a seven-seat SUV that serves as the Chinese company Chery's flagship. It offers exceptional value for money, but then, so does the cheaper Tiggo 8, which also seats seven. Is its big brother worth spending more on? Find out in our full Chery Tiggo 9 review. 

Chery is a company that you may not have heard much. if anything, about, but believe us when we say that it means business. It might be a new name on you, but Chery International is a company that’s been going since 1997 in its native market of China, and now holds the distinction of being that country’s largest exporter of new cars, so it’s safe to say it knows a thing or two about manufacturing and selling vehicles.

Although an experienced exporter of cars to a variety of other countries around the world, under a variety of different brand names, the company only made it to European shores fairly recently. It initially made its UK debut in late 2024 with the Omoda brand, closely followed by Jaecoo in early 2025, both brands promising a premium experience for a mainstream price.

The Chery brand is the latest to be introduced by Chery International (the parent company of all three brands), and this is designed to rival more mainstream brands with even lower prices, all while providing a level of standard equipment that puts rivals to shame.

Chery kicked off its UK offering with the Tiggo 7 (a five-seat SUV) and the Tiggo 8 (a seven-seat SUV), and the Tiggo 9 we’re talking about in this review represents the brand’s third UK offering. It’s another seven-seat SUV, but is slightly bigger (and we mean slightly) than the Tiggo 8, and it’s held up by Chery as the company’s flagship. It’s offered in just one form, with a powerful plug-in hybrid setup, and in a single highly specified trim level that provides a colossal amount of luxury kit as standard. And yet, as promised, prices undercut those of rivals by thousands.

The plug-in hybrid engine might not give you the sort of efficiency you expect, but it is immensely powerful with 428PS, and it’s also impressively smooth and quiet in its operation. It complements the Tiggo 9’s other on-road manners, in fact: the car has a soft suspension that gives a pleasantly cosseting ride, along with handling that’s capable, if slightly clumsy.

And don’t go thinking that Chery achieves its low prices by scrimping on interior quality. The Tiggo’s 9’s cabin feels plush and sophisticated, with nice materials and a generally impressive level of fit and finish. The minimalist design does inevitably mean an over-reliance on touchscreen technology (doesn’t it always these days?), which does present a few ergonomic issues, and there are a few other annoyances, too, such as over-nannying safety alerts.

Some rival seven-seater SUVs are also roomier and more practical, ultimately, but these rivals are a lot more expensive, and the Tiggo 9 does well enough in this area to convince.

All in all, the Tiggo 9 is a car that gives you a lot of appealing abilities for a very tempting price. It’s not entirely convincing in all areas, granted, but its weaknesses aren’t severe enough to spoil the overall package.

As a big family SUV, ride comfort and refinement are the dynamic traits you want above all others in the Tiggo 9, and happily, that’s precisely what Chery has gone for. The suspension is fairly soft and does a good job of shielding you from the effects of lumps and bumps in the road. 

In fact, part of our test route took in some particularly nasty sections of rutted and grainy Tarmac, and although we could feel the scruffiness of the surface beneath us, the car did a good enough job that things didn’t feel uncomfortable. And, over less severe surfaces, the car wafts along serenely most of the time. Sure, the ride isn’t perfect, as it’ll occasionally feel slightly over a bump that you’d think it’d deal with easily, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

It’s true that the soft suspension does result in quite a bit of body roll in corners, and this certainly isn’t a car that relishes fast direction changes (not helped by steering that has an artificial, slightly rubbery feel, but at least it’s pretty well weighted and consistent). Importantly, though, the loose body control is nothing that feels unreasonable or unsettling, and it’s well worth putting up with for the comfort you get.

Decent refinement complements the car’s easy-going nature. The engine largely keeps itself to itself (more on that in a moment), and wind- and road noise are pretty well contained, too. You might be less impressed by the brakes, though, which are oversensitive and slightly grabby.

The Chery Tiggo 9 is the firm’s flagship, and as such, is offered with a high-end engine worthy of one. It’s a plug-in hybrid system that has two electric motors - one on each axle - along with a 34kWh battery pack, a 1.5-litre turbocharged petrol engine, and a three-speed automatic gearbox. The car always starts off in electric-only mode, and the petrol motor only kicks in when dictated by either a low battery level (it’s never allowed to run completely flat) or by the rate of acceleration requested by the driver.

With all the various power sources totted up, the total output of the system stands at a heady 428PS. The Tiggo 9 is capable of getting from 0-62mph in just 5.4 seconds, impressive given the car’s considerable size and weight.

Whether or not the car feels that quick depends on which of the numerous driving modes you select. A few of them are off-road-focussed (we haven’t tried the car off-road, so can’t really tell you how effective they are), but the more road-focussed ones are named simply Eco, Normal and Sport. Each of these gives you the same amount of overall power, but what changes is the eagerness with which it’s served up.

Regardless of mode, the car’s initial throttle response is slow, meaning a marked hesitation of a second or so between you pressing the pedal and anything meaningful happening. In Eco mode, when the car finally does react, it does so in a gentle and measured way. It’s brisk enough to get you around with purpose, but the attitude of the engine remains relaxed, and you have to push the accelerator pedal hard and long to make the drivetrain break that demeanour.

Things are very different if you switch to Sport mode. Here, that initial hesitancy is followed by an extremely strong surge of forward momentum. The sensation is a little odd due to the contrasting nature of these two characteristics, but there’s no doubting that once the car gets into its stride, the Tiggo 9 feels quick enough that you believe those numbers we quoted earlier.

For us, Normal mode provides a happy medium between the two extremes. That initial lazy throttle response is still there, but the subsequent acceleration is pared back enough compared with Sport mode that the power delivery doesn’t feel so odd, while it also generally feels keener and more muscular than Eco mode.

Regardless of the mode you select, the hybrid setup works impressively smoothly. It’s predictably quiet when running in electric-only mode - which it can do for up to 91 miles on a full charge, according to official figures - and it’s not much noisier when the petrol engine cuts in, with noise from the engine bay being very well isolated, even when the petrol unit is working hard. Most of the time, with more gentle use, you’ll struggle to detect whether it's firing at all.

As you’d expect, a lavishly appointed car like the Tiggo 9 also comes with a vast array of driver assistance tech, all as standard. The roster includes Adaptive Cruise Control with Traffic Jam Assistance, Blind Spot Detection with Door Opening Warning, autonomous emergency braking, Front- and Rear Collision Warning, Rear Cross Traffic Alert and Braking, Lane Departure Warning and Prevention, Lane Changing Assist, and Emergency Lane Keep.

Predictably, there’s a very long and convoluted submenu buried deep within the touchscreen’s menu ecosystem with which you can turn off some of the more annoying alerts. And you’ll likely want to, because the constant bings and bongs that accompany your progress are both relentless and rage-inducing.

Handily, some of these functions are also represented in a quick-access alternative that you can get to by simply swiping down from the top edge of the screen, making disabling them quicker and easier. 

However, when you turn off the car and restart it, all the systems you turn off are immediately reactivated, so you have to go through the same rigmarole on every single drive. What’s more, during our test drive, we used a combination of both menus to turn off everything that we could possibly find to turn off, and regardless, some of the bings and bongs just kept on coming, and with many of them, we never quite got to the bottom of what they were warning us about.

At the time of writing, there wasn't a Euro NCAP score for the car, but it's worth noting that the smaller Tiggo 7 scored four stars out of five when tested by the safety body. Its rating was carried over to the structurally identical Tiggo 8.

You’d think an enormous, heavy SUV like the Tiggo 9 would be absolute mustard for towing, but that’s not really the case. It’s rated to pull a braked trailer of up to 1500kg, which is a very average figure in the scheme of things.

 In terms of dimensions, the Chery Tiggo 9 is 4810mm long, 2223mm wide (including door mirrors), and 1741mm tall, with a wheelbase of 2800mm. That makes it a shade bigger than a Skoda Kodiaq, a touch smaller than a Hyundai Santa Fe, and just about bang-on with a Kia Sorento.

Interestingly, it’s only a shade bigger - around 8.5cm in length - than Chery’s other seven-seater SUV, the Tiggo 8. We’ll come back to this comparison in a little while, but for now, let’s talk about what you can generally expect from the Tiggo 9 in terms of practicality and versatility.

The front seats feel predictably spacious, and the standard electric adjustment for both the front seats and the steering wheel makes it quick and easy to find a comfortable driving position. Some drivers might wish there were a bit more range of movement in the steering adjustment, but this won’t impact your comfort to a major degree. Your all-round visibility from the driver’s seat is nice and clear, and the numerous cubbies and pockets dotted around the front of the cabin also mean that storage is pretty good.

If you’re travelling in the second row of seats, then in normal circumstances, you’ll get plenty of headroom and legroom, so you’ll be comfy even if you’re particularly tall. The middle row of seats also has both heating and cooling, just like the front ones, so you can bake your buns or chill your cheeks as you see fit. Things will become a lot more snug if you try carrying three passengers across the rear bench rather than two, but the cabin is wide enough that three adults will fit.

The middle row of seats is split 60/40, and each portion can be reclined, folded, and slid backwards and forwards on runners on the floor. And if you want to put anyone in the third-row seats, which fold up out of the boot floor, then sliding those middle seats forward is precisely what you’ll need to do, because otherwise, third-row legroom is almost non-existent. You certainly won’t want to slide those middle seats all the way to the forwardmost point of their travel, mind, because at that point, their occupants’ knees will be pressing uncomfortably into the backs of the front seats.

However, if those in the middle row find the centre-point of the runners, then everyone should have just about enough knee room to travel comfortably, although those of six foot and over will want to bag a spot on the middle row due to limited third-row headroom.

Squeezing into the rearmost seats in the first place presents its own set of challenges, too. If you pull a catch on the outer middle seat, the seat slides, tips and raises out of your way, but the gap you climb through is still pretty small and knowing where to put your feet as you go takes some practice. Not only that, but this access mechanism is only present on the right-hand side of the car, so getting in from the left is even more difficult. 

Naturally, the size of the boot depends on how many seats are in use at any one time. With all seven chairs in place, the Tiggo 9 gives you 143 litres for bags, while with just five seats in use, that increases to 819 litres. From simply looking at the load area, we strongly suspect that this second figure is measured right up to the roof, rather than up to a load cover, as is more conventional with most other manufacturers. In two-seat mode, you get a maximum load capacity of 2021 litres. All of the folded seats lie at a slight angle, giving your entire extended load area a gentle slope, but they do at least lie level with each other, so there are no irritating steps.

So overall, how does the Tiggo 9 compare on passenger space and boot capacity with the rivals mentioned at the top of this section? Well, on cargo capacity, the Skoda, Kia and Hyundai all carry numerical advantages to a greater or lesser extent, and the latter two feel a bit roomier in the third row. However, in terms of everyday useability, the differences are marginal, and the Tiggo 9 will ably play the role of a jobbing family seven-seater.

The more interesting comparison comes with the Chery Tiggo 8 we also mentioned earlier. By contrast, the Tiggo 9 does have a small numerical advantage over its slightly smaller stablemate, but it is only small. For example, the boot space figure with all seven seats in place is only a mere 26 litres better in the Tiggo 9 than in the Tiggo 8.

But importantly, in terms of general cargo space, passenger space, and everyday practicality and versatility, there really is very little in it between the two models. And as we’ll find out later, the Tiggo 8 can be had for a lot less cash than the Tiggo 9. 

The Chery Tiggo 9 might be built and sold by a value-focused brand, but you wouldn’t know that from looking inside it. The interior has lots of tactile soft-touch surfaces, plus some really nice dark wood trim pieces, and the man-made leather looks and feels plausible enough to almost pass for the real McCoy. The plastics get a little more functional as you look lower down in the cabin, with a harder and more durable finish, but even these are textured in a way that makes them at last look smart.

Some might feel that there’s maybe a bit too much piano black panelling and fake metallic trim dotted around the place, but it doesn’t look too chintzy, and the overall impression of the car’s interior is one of sophistication. It’s only the slightly flimsy-feeling window switches that betray that slightly.

As with most new cars these days, the Chery Tiggo 9’s infotainment display forms the focal point of the car’s interior. The central touchscreen is a large 15.6-inch item, and there’s also a 10.25-inch digital instrument display behind the steering wheel.

First, let’s talk about the good bits. The graphics on both are sharp and stylish, and the screen transitions are quick, slick and glitch-free. Most of the onscreen icons are large enough to hit at a glance, and they’re designed in such a way that it’s fairly clear what they do. There’s all the functionality you could want, too, including DAB radio, Bluetooth, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, wireless phone charging, a 14-speaker Sony sound system, and a ’Hello Chery’ virtual assistant.

There are plenty of positives, then, but it’s true that there are also some negatives. That  ’Hello Chery’ virtual assistant we just talked about didn’t even understand any of the commands we tried (which were fairly basic), let alone carry them out. To be fair, though, that’s not entirely unusual with such systems, which are often pretty rubbish.

Further issues lie within the screen, though. As is the fashion with car interior design these days, the minimalist cabin is very light on physical buttons and switches, which means that pretty much every function has to be controlled through the car’s touchscreen. And there are just so many functions to deal with that the ecosystem of menus and submenus is very convoluted.

In fairness, things could be worse because the menus are at least fairly logically arranged, but they’re just so long, containing reams and reams of settings and options, and there’s very little to separate all these options visually. As a result, it’s pretty easy to get lost when trying to perform a fairly major function, and even easier when going after a minor one.

And yes, our usual gripe of there not being physical air-con controls applies to the Tiggo 9, meaning that you have to muck about with the screen to fiddle with those settings. Worse still, the icons for air-con functionality aren’t permanently displayed on the screen. That said, finding them isn’t too arduous: to get to the ventilation display, you simply swipe upwards from the bottom edge of the screen and hit the fan icon that appears.

The digital instrument screen isn’t ideal, either. Despite its generous size, the various nuggets of driver information are displayed in very small text, making them difficult to read, and they’re positioned mainly around the peripheral areas of the screen, making it more likely that they could be further obscured by the steering wheel. All this is very odd considering that there’s so much empty white space in the middle part of the screen.

The Tiggo 9’s performance in this area very much depends on how you look at things. At launch, the price of the car is £43,105, and compared with most rivals – especially those with anything like the amount of standard equipment provided by the Tiggo 9 – this looks like exceedingly good value. But then again, if you’re going to choose a relatively unknown Chinese brand over a more familiar one from Europe or Korea, it’d have to be, right?

For context, let’s take a look at some of those rivals. Initially, the Skoda Kodiaq’s pricing looks like it’s vaguely similar, until you realise that the PHEV version of the Skoda can’t be had with seven seats (due to packaging constraints), so it’s not really a direct competitor. 

The top-spec version of the Peugeot 5008, when equipped with a plug-in hybrid arrangement, retails at around £47,000, which isn’t all that far behind the Chery. However, the Peugeot is markedly tighter on both interior space and standard equipment, plus it has a lot less power.

Look at top-spec plug-in-hybrid versions of the Kia Sorento and Hyundai Santa Fe, and you’re looking at sums of around £56,000 and £58,000, respectively, so the Chery has a massive financial advantage here. These Korean rivals are fairly close to the Chery in terms of equipment and even a bit ahead when it comes to interior space and practicality, but they still have a much lower power output. Those comments could also apply to the PHEV version of the Volvo XC90, but with a starting price of around £73,000 for that car, the pricing is in another ballpark entirely.

So, things are looking pretty rosy for the Tiggo 9, then. Well, yes, they would be, were it not for competition from within. You see, Chery has another seven-seater SUV on offer in the form of the Chery Tiggo 8, which, as we discovered earlier on in the practicality section of this review, is barely any smaller than the Tiggo 9 in terms of overall size, and puts in a very similar performance - near-identical, in fact - on both passenger space and luggage space.

You can have the Tiggo 8 with the same PHEV setup as the Tiggo 9 - albeit in detuned 204PS form - and when specced in range-topping Summit trim, which isn’t far off the 9 in terms of standard kit, it costs around £36,500, making it much cheaper still than the Tiggo 9. The two cars are also very similar in terms of their road manners and interior quality, so the 9 has very little discernible advantage there, certainly not enough to justify a circa-£6,500 difference in price.

What’s more, if you’re not bothered about having all the equipment under the sun, or a plug-in hybrid, then the Tiggo 8 can be had in an entry-level trim (which is still very generously kitted, by the way), and with a non-PHEV petrol for as little as £28,600. Suddenly, the Tiggo 9 starts to look a little bit redundant.

The Chery Tiggo 9 has a better all-electric range than most other PHEVs we could name: its large 34.5kWh battery pack affords it up to 91 miles of electric-only running, according to official WLTP figures.

The official WLTP combined fuel economy figure that this electric-only range gives the Tiggo 9 comes out at around 470mpg, but as we’ve said countless times before, that figure is all but useless. The official tests are unrealistically flattering to plug-in hybrid cars, so they’re miles from being a level playing field between PHEVs and petrol and diesel cars.

Giving credit to Chery, the firm does quote a figure that’s adjusted accordingly, which many manufacturers don’t, and that figure comes out at 40.9mpg. A little underwhelming, perhaps, but at least very achievable day-to-day. And, if you keep your throttle inputs light, your battery topped up, and your regular journeys short enough that they can be completed on electric-only power, then you might not use a single drop of fuel from week to week.

Juicing up your battery will take a little over five hours on a regular 7kW home wallbox charger, and cost around £9 if you pay the UK’s national average rate for your domestic electricity. However, if you get yourself on a variable tariff and charge your car overnight on heavily discounted off-peak power, you’ll pay less than half that.

By PHEV standards, the Tiggo 9’s maximum DC charging speed of 71kW is very good, and means that a 30% to 80% top-up can be delivered in 18 minutes. Charging this way will be considerably more expensive than charging at home, though.

Choosing a PHEV doesn’t earn you any kind of relief on VED road tax, and because the list price of the Tiggo 9 is over £40,000, you’ll also be clobbered for the ‘luxury car surcharge’ on VED. So, 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.

The Tiggo 9 sits in group 44 for insurance, and since group 50 cars are the most expensive to insure, the big Chery is not far off that. Not really surprising given the power it has.

Chery is a brand that likes to peddle an ‘everything as standard’ ethos, and the Tiggo 9 also happens to be the brand’s flagship. As a result, the car is offered in one single highly-specced trim level - known as Summit - that comes with pretty much every bell and whistle you can think of included in the price. The only optional extra is exterior paint, with only white offered for free.

The standard roster for the Chery Tiggo 9 Summit includes:

• 20-inch alloy wheels
• LED headlights, taillights and running lights
• Heated windscreen
• Privacy glass
• Panoramic sunroof with powered sunshade
• Powered tailgate
• Automatic lights and wipers
• Vegan 'leather' upholstery
• Dual-zone climate control
• Ambient lighting
• Heated steering wheel with power adjustment
• Power-adjusting front seats with massage function
• Heating and ventilation for the front seats
• Heating and ventilation for the middle-row seats
• Front/rear parking sensors
• 540-degree external cameras
• Adaptive cruise control
• 15.6-inch central infotainment touchscreen
• 10.25-inch digital instrument display
• Head-up display
• 14-speaker Sony sound system
• Apple CarPlay and Android Auto
• Wireless phone charging
• 'Hello Chery’ virtual assistant