Chery Tiggo 8 plug-in hybrid (2025 - ) review

The Tiggo 8 is not the outright cheapest way to carry up to seven people – that accolade still goes to the Dacia Jogger – but the Chery does offer bags of space, practicality and features for a very reasonable price. The petrol Tiggo 8 officially only does 36mpg, though, so fuel costs will quickly add up. Meanwhile, the more expensive plug-in Super Hybrid (as Chery brands it) uses a relatively large battery and some clever tech to provide very impressive fuel economy. Our test car arrived with a full tank and consistently claimed it was doing over 50mpg, despite not being plugged in once. We reckon even without charging the battery from a plug, the Tiggo 8 Super Hybrid would genuinely cover over 600 miles before you needed to fill up. Given the size of the car, this is a respectable effort. If you use it properly by regularly charging the battery at home, you can make the most of up to 56 miles of all-electric range and you may find you rarely fire up the engine at all.

Chery launched in the UK in 2025, so it’s too soon to get a full view of long-term reliability. However, Chery has been around in China since the 1990s and the seven-year/100,000-miles warranty suggests it has plenty of confidence in its products. For extra peace of mind, the battery in the plug-in hybrid Tiggo 8 gets its own eight-year/100,000-mile cover and Chery throws in 12 months of roadside assistance too, just in case.

The Tiggo 8 packs 10 airbags plus a seemingly endless list of safety tech, including driver attention monitoring, lane keeping assistance, emergency braking, adaptive cruise control and blind spot monitoring which also alerts to prevent you reversing out into oncoming traffic. These systems didn’t seem as overzealous as our experience of the Tiggo 7, although we’ve docked a point because most of the car’s settings are controlled via the touch-screen. That said, things like adjusting the climate control were easy enough to do on the move and we appreciated the physical dials for vital functions like lights and wipers.

The Tiggo 8 is decently roomy and provides more than enough space to transport four adults in comfort and even five wouldn’t have much to complain about. The second row has plenty of headroom and the almost flat floor provides ample legroom, too. Adding a third row of seats provides extra flexibility over the Tiggo 7, but it is extremely tight back there and very much intended for occasional use by small children. With the third row in place, boot space is much smaller than the Peugeot 5008 or Skoda Kodiaq and even with it folded away the Chery isn’t the largest in its class, but it should offer enough practicality for most families. There’s a soft and squidgy quality to the Tiggo 8 which makes it very comfortable at a motorway cruise, and it also smooths out small imperfections in the road admirably. The flip side is the Tiggo 8 leans heavily around corners, so navigating several roundabouts in a row can leave you feeling a little seasick – if you live in Milton Keynes, this might not be the car for you. The steering is very light which makes the car easy to manoeuvre around town, though it’s best driven gently on twisty roads and avoiding a more spirited approach.

There are two trim levels: Aspire and Summit. All cars come well-equipped with features like a powered driver’s seat, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, front and rear parking sensors (though one of the rear sensors in our car wasn’t working) and dual zone climate control. You also get what Chery calls a ‘540-degree’ camera which fills the central display with both a bird’s-eye perspective and other useful angles such as your front or rear wheels. Moving up to Summit trim you’ll gain goodies like heated front and rear seats, a heated steering wheel, ventilated front seats, a massage seat (weirdly only for the passenger), a powered tailgate, a head-up display and a Sony sound system. Like many Chinese cars the driver display is grainy and cluttered with inexplicably small fonts, while the 15.6-inch main touch-screen is sharp and responsive but devotes most of the space to the background wallpaper. We find this baffling and would favour larger widgets at the very least, but c’est la vie. We’ll forgive Chery because you can have a range-topping Tiggo 8 for less than the entry price of its rivals.

We spent a week with the plug-in Super Hybrid which by some technical wizardry provides an almost EV-like driving with the added flexibility of a petrol engine for longer journeys. If the battery gets too low the car pops itself into Smart mode which balances self-charging and economy to keep the battery topped up. Even in this mode we hardly noticed the engine working behind the scenes and only heard it kick in on a handful of occasions when we needed to accelerate hard. Alternatively, you can force the battery to charge to maximise the number of miles you can do in fully electric mode later. The Tiggo 8 offers multiple drive modes although these make little difference to how the car performs. We found our car defaulted to Eco every time we set off anyway, but this was no bad thing as the Tiggo 8 was still nippy enough to keep up with traffic while pulling off the kind of efficiency you’d expect from a much smaller car. There is a petrol version of the Tiggo 8 which we haven’t driven yet but given our experience of the same set-up in the Tiggo 7, we are confident the plug-in hybrid is the one to go for.