3 June 2025

This Chery might be the best-value SUV we've seen this year

4 June 2025 | James Coleman

Top marks for the styling. Photo: James Coleman.

I realise it’s only June, but I might have already found a contender for this year’s Car of the Year.

To be clear, Chery’s new Tiggo 7 Pro SE+ is not perfect. In much the same way as food at an all-you-can-eat buffet is never perfect. But when it costs $35 a person, you’re not going to care about a bit of brown stuff coming out of the king prawn.

There are petty things, like the fact that ‘SE’ stands for ‘Special Edition’, but there are only two models available in Australia, and the only difference is that one gets the ‘+’ on the end. What’s a standard edition like? No one knows.

It also uses a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox. This is a technological inheritance from 1970s motorsport, when Porsche didn’t want their drivers wasting precious seconds changing gears themselves. Their engineers, therefore, devised a system in which one clutch was in use while the other had the next gear already prepped and ready to engage.

They then spent even more time spelling its name – the ‘Doppelkupplungsgetriebe‘ (literally, ‘dual-clutch gearbox’).

They’re very common these days – especially in cars in the Volkswagen universe – but with modern autos having grown so fast and slick, I’m wondering what their place is, especially in a family SUV.

There’s a lot of grumbling from the Chery’s gearbox when you start off, and even when it does need another gear, it’s like it gets there on a walker. There’s a delay and a flailing of revs.

You do learn to work around it, though.

The same goes for the 1.6-litre petrol engine’s turbo lag, which is enough time to take a Zoom meeting. Take off is pretty ordinary (0-100 km/h in 9.5 seconds), but then you hit almost exactly 2500 rpm and it BOOMS into gear. The turbo boost hits so hard, the tyres almost squeal – a bit disconcerting when you’re halfway through a roundabout or in a car park.

Using the adaptive cruise control on the highway, it almost bunny hops when it reaches the same RPM, too.

Photos: James Coleman.

As with the other Cherys I’ve tested so far, another feature you’ll want to disable after about 100 metres is the driver monitoring system. Put your sunglasses on and it will bong and flash up a message on the dash about how “you have been distracted” and seconds later, “you have been distracted for a long time”.

But then you look at it, and maybe the rear wheels are too small for the rest of the car and might have been pinched off an office chair, but you realise the styling is very sharp.

The ambient lighting can change colour depending on what drive mode you’re in. Photo: James Coleman.

The interior is just as stunning, with its sweeping, glossy carbon-fibre-look dash, Mercedes-esque and Sony door-mounted speakers, and sporty, leather-like seats, all of which are well-made.

There’s also a 360-degree camera, so you can swipe at an image on the screen and spin your car around, similar to Gran Turismo, to see what’s around you. You do have to plug your phone in to use Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, which is doubly sad because it means you need to detract from the cabin’s styling with a messy cable.

Acronyms will also appear on the dash, which you won’t understand. Similar to in the military, you’d think it would be simple to just say “instant fuel consumption” rather than “IFC”, in the same way “bomb” takes less effort to say than “IED”. But not to Chery.

Once I’d grown used to the quirks from the drivetrain and the slightly boaty handling, I actually found myself smiling at the wheel, too.

Most of this comes down to the single fact that – due to an offer ending 30 June – Chery’s all-you-can-eat buffet currently starts from $29,990 driveaway for the Tiggo 7 Pro SE, and $33,990 for the SE+, both with a seven-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty included. Nowadays, that’s a bit incredible.

And – let’s not forget – that’s for a ‘Special Edition’.