NINE LIVES(some text hidden)

By Jonathan Crouch

Ten Second Review word count: 34

With the Chery Tiggo 9, conservative looks hide advanced Plug-in Hybrid engineering. This upper mid-sized Chinese seven-seat luxury SUV offers class-leading EV range and an awful lot of space and metal for your money.

Background word count: 173

So you're after a seven-seat family SUV. You're on a budget but don't want a used car. And despite the current zeitgeist, you don't really want an EV with all its range anxiety and charging caveats. But you need something a bit more tax-efficient than a diesel. And you'd like to spoil whoever will be driving the thing. A challenging set of criteria? Well let's introduce you to a car that claims to be able to tick all these boxes, the Chery Tiggo 9. 'A what?' you're probably wondering. Don't worry, no one else you know will have heard of it either. Chery is a Chinese brand who launched here in mid-2025 with smaller Tiggo 7 and Tiggo 8 models, basically repackaged but better-value versions of the same designs the Chery Group sells here with Jaecoo and Omoda badges. The Tiggo 9 serves up more of the same, a repackaged version of the Omoda 9. Which means that this Chery flagship model is a powerful petrol Plug-in Hybrid. Let's take a closer look.

Driving Experience word count: 259

If you're expecting a big heavy Plug-in Hybrid seven-seat SUV of this sort to be interesting to drive, you're clearly a very optimistic sort of person indeed. This one isn't of course, nor does it particularly need to be. All the engineering here is shared with the Omoda 9 - which actually means it's quite impressive. The drive battery size - 34.5kWh - is simply enormous for a PHEV; there are some full-EV cars with drive batteries not much bigger than that. And it facilitates a simply enormous full-EV driving range figure of 91 miles. To give you some class perspective on that, a rival Peugeot 5008 PHEV (which has a battery of just 21kWh) goes only 55 miles on battery energy. And, by the way, has just 198PS of power, with 0-62mph in 8.3s. In contrast, the Chery Tiggo 9 has 428PS and gets to 62mph in just 5.4s. Now you see the step forward being made here. And you also see why the Chery Motor Group wanted to use this advanced powertrain in more than just one model. And advanced it is. With so many braked horses on tap, you might be surprised to learn that the turbo four cylinder unit in question here is just 1.5-litres in size. But it's boosted by a pair of electric motors and a starter generator in the three-speed auto gearbox, hence the prodigious 580Nm torque figure - significantly more than its closest non-Chery Group rivals. None of whom can be used as much like an EV as this car can.