Chery will launch its Omoda and Jaecoo brands in the UK in the coming months, with plans to rapidly expand to an eight model line-up of petrol, hybrid and electric cars by 2025.
Founded in 1997, Chery is one of China’s largest car manufacturers - and its leading exporter of cars. It established the Omoda and Jaecoo brands specifically for international expansion and has been working on its UK entry for more than a year.
Omoda is a fashion-focused brand, while Jaecoo has a more performance-based and off-road slant. Both will focus on offering a line-up of "affordable premium" SUVs, offering high levels of standard kit at competitive prices.
Omoda and Jaecoo will share dealerships. There are around 65 so far confirmed for launch – and plans for around 100 to be in place by the end of this year.
The brands will arrive in the UK with the Omoda 5 and Jaecoo 7, which are both Nissan Qashqai-sized SUVs.
Chery’s engineering team leader, former Jaguar Land Rover engineer Peter Matkin, vowed that the two models would be specially tuned for UK roads.
“We’ve put a lot of focus in developing cars for Europe,” he said. “We have a small team in Frankfurt that has conducted extensive benchmarking and development work, and we’ve shipped cars they’ve developed to China so our team there can learn from them.
“The UK cars will have bespoke damper settings, spring rates and bush rates, and we’ve made adjustments to the anti-roll bars to make sure they meet European tastes more closely.”
Matkin added that such localisation would extend to the technology and infotainment system in the cars, nothing that Omoda was redesigning key elements of the touchscreen controls, including entirely new screens and priorities for certain processes.
Omoda and Jaecoo: the launch line-up
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One of the new dealers is one which was dumped by Stellantis, who don't give a hoot for the years of support given by often family run businesses. If the Chinese take over the market, as it has with steel and most consumer products, people like Tavares have a lot to answer for.
All these new Chinese models coming to the UK,how many will actually have a long term future here? already some Japanese manufacturers such as Daihatsu & Mitsubishi are no longer sold here and other Asian manufacturers like Proton didn't stay the course after a promising start so it'll be interesting to see how many are still here in ten years time