Chery bids to make up on lost time against other Chinese budget brands with a particularly low-budget hybrid SUV
You may have read a great deal, over the last year or so, about the rising fortunes of Chinese budget brands within the UK market. They are certainly enjoying a period of rapid expansion. But some are growing faster than others, and some have yet to really hit what you might call ‘the big time’ as far as car sales on our shores are concerned. That’s why cars with the potential to fuel rapid transformation suddenly appearing. Right now, the race is on to grab as big a slice of the UK pie as possible before somebody else beats you to it – and the Chery Tiggo 4 has the look of a car with some serious buffet-blocking elbows.As figures recently released for car registrations for the first half of 2026 confirm, the only Chinese brand with a place among the UK’s top 10 best-selling car makers remains MG. BYD and Chery’s own Jaecoo brand both have berths within the top 20, however, and both currently have much faster rates of growth than MG’s. Blink, then, and all this could be different.The interesting quirk about Chery’s particular case is that both of its offshoot brands - Jaecoo and Omoda - were introduced to the UK earlier than the Chery brand itself so are slightly both better-established in terms of UK volume and market share. That situation is what the Tiggo 4 might be out to justify, because it’s quite a lot of pretty conventional car for really not a lot of money - a recipe that has proven popular time and again, and not only in the UK.The Tiggo 4 is a hybrid-powered compact SUV. It has an upright and chunky look. It’s a useful-looking size, straddling the SUV-B (Dacia Duster, Kia Stonic) and SUV-C (Nissan Qashqai, Citroën C5 Aircross) segments. It’s got good, appealing on-paper performance and economy statistics. Yet it’s conspicuously cheap, starting from just £19,995, when even the average Ford Puma rival is typically several thousand pounds more.So is there a catch? And will owners really care even if there are a few of them, given how much car they’re getting and how little they’re paying here?
