Chery Tiggo 4 to bypass local chassis tune

DESPITE having only arrived in Australia in October 2024, the hugely popular Chery Tiggo 4 small SUV appears destined for a complete refresh as this ageing design – its core mechanical and body engineering date back to 2017 in China – attempts to keep pace with the increasing sophistication of much newer vehicles in the broader Chery stable.

Responding to criticism about the ride comfort, handling, steering and refinement of the current Tiggo 4 and whether it could be improved by localised tuning – as per GWM’s decision to tune vehicle suspension locally – Chery Australia chief operating officer Lucas Harris said a totally new Tiggo 4 model line was just around the corner.

Given the current Tiggo 4’s old platform, he said only the imminent new-generation model would be able to show any real dynamic improvement and that localisation would be limited to calibration of active safety and driver assistance (ADAS) tech.

“It’ll need to be the next-generation platform – I don’t think we’re going to see any massive leaps on the same platform,” admitted Mr Harris.

“I could share – well, I can’t share – when the next-generation (Tiggo 4) will be, but I’m sure you could imagine it’s not far away,” he said, alluding to the eight-year-old centre structure and underpinnings of the current Tiggo 4, placing it among the oldest automotive designs currently on sale Australia, especially Chinese ones.

As Mr Harris pointed out, “for China, eight years is an eternity”, hinting that Australia will not wait long for a new-from-the-ground-up Tiggo 4 to overcome the product lag relative to its stablemates – perhaps unbeknown to the 15,864 Australians who have bought one so far in 2025.

What the next-generation Tiggo 4 will not receive – or potentially need, according to Mr Harris – is an Australian suspension tune, as lavished on GWM’s future models.

“I hope it works very well for them (GWM’s Australian tuning). Good on them. It’s a great step, I hope it helps them, (and) I really hope it works out well. (But) our focus on the localisation (of Chery products) starting with ADAS is because that is a much less subjective thing – whether it’s good or not.

“Frankly, you don’t have to be particularly experienced or particularly expert to determine whether (the ADAS is) good or not, so that has been an incredibly obvious place for us to start working.”

Mr Lucas said ride and handling were “subjective to a smaller portion of the population than those who are deeply annoyed and frustrated by unnecessary bings and bongs or tugging on the steering wheel – all these sorts of things”.

“We’ve tried to focus our starting point of ‘what does that local development look like?’ where it obviously, frankly, pisses off the most amount of people. That’s a good place to start.

“That’s not to say that we’re not progressing through things like ride and handling and more small refinement, even things like the language used in the infotainment system in the dash.

“We’ve been going through it painstakingly over the last two-and-a-half years, checking every single phrase, and there’s thousands.

“How do we help guide the factory to get those little bits of refinement right? Are we perfect? No. Is there a night and day difference between where we were two-and-a-half years ago and today? Absolutely. You’d have to be blind not to see it.

“So I think it’s a fair question (to ask about the dynamic tuning of Chery products), but it’s not as simple as just employing somebody to focus on ride and handling. I don't think that’s our focus right now – customers are much more interested, based on the feedback that we get, in some of the specs and the creature comforts.

“There was absolute dismay when we launched Tiggo 7 and it didn’t have a power tailgate – hysteria! So it’s things like that that consumers have been far more interested in than, ‘I don’t like the steering on the car.’

“It’s not that I don’t think it’s important (ride and handling) – I just don’t think it’s our number one thing that we need to fix immediately before anything else,” he said.

When it comes to offering competitive dynamics in future products, Mr Harris is satisfied that Chery’s expanding global footprint – it now has eight global R&D centres – will be able to account for European and Australian tastes.

“If we talk about dynamic handling, we have engineering and R&D centres in Europe and obviously Asia, North America, and a fairly large R&D centre in Germany. I don’t think we need to have an R&D centre in Australia to have a well dynamically tuned vehicle. What we need to have is people who understand this market (and) who can clearly articulate what it is that we want to those R&D centres.

“The capability of the engineers out of China is exceptional, and you can’t not have that with such a huge population in such a competitive environment. So the skill level is very high and they deliver on what’s asked for,” he said.

“Having those R&D centres, particularly the one in Germany, is really important to us. And yes, all the roads in Germany are beautiful, but there’s some neighbouring countries on their eastern border where the roads are not beautiful, which obviously get tested in. There are some vehicles that are sold in our market that have all their R&D done in Germany – they don’t do any localised tuning for dynamic handling – and they’re excellent for dynamic handling.

“I don’t think we just have to have an Australian guy do it. What we do need to have is experienced people from inside our market, able to give the requirement to the right partner that we have in R&D.

“That’s not to say that we don’t employ locals, and that’s not to say that we don’t have experts locally, but we don’t have to go and build a workshop and do all that stuff here ourselves. We’ve got global access and global resource to do it,” said Mr Harris.