A good ownership experience, value-for-money products, dealers in the right places, and availability of spare parts are what Chery says will eventually help it land a place in the Top 10 best-selling car brands.
Chery’s local boss says the brand hasn’t “just come and started selling cars”, it is playing the long game in a bid to become one of Australia’s Top 10 best-selling car makers.
Speaking with Drive at the launch of the new Chery Tiggo 7 and Tiggo 8 Super Hybrid SUVs, Lucas Harris, Chery Australia’s Chief Operating Officer, said eventually the marque wants to break into the Top 10.
“I think any car maker who says they don't want to be in the Top 10 is probably telling fibs, right? An obvious next step for us is how do we break into that Top 10,” he told us.
While many of those have been in the market for decades, BYD’s local growth shows new, and particularly Chinese brands, can have huge cut-through in Australia.
So far this year, Chery has sold 14,123 cars, up from 12,603 for the full calendar year in 2024, and 5810 in 2023 when it relaunched as a brand here with the Omoda 5 small SUV. That puts it in 15th place year-to-date.
Its best-selling vehicle now is the Chery Tiggo 4 Pro, which was voted the Drive Car of the Year 2025 Best Urban Car Under $30K. Since January 2024, Chery's share of the market has grown from 0.8 per cent to 2.6.
How to continue that upward trajectory, though, according to Harris, is about setting up for the long haul and not just pitching up to shift cars quickly.
“We deliver a lot of things that a lot of new brands, regardless of whether they're from China or somewhere else, don’t,” the Chery boss told Drive.
“We offer extremely high-value-for-money products where you get an enormous amount for what you pay. We've also got a very professional dealer network of around 80 dealers, and we'll have 90 by the end of the year.
“Unlike established brands who think more is better, we think better is better. And so we strategically have placed those dealers around, obviously in major metro areas, provincial and regional towns to make sure that we've got network coverage there to support customers.
“We have a $25 million-plus investment in spare parts holding locally in Australia. We have 80-plus dedicated Chery employees, local employees, plus maybe another 30 or 40 from our direct team in China helping us.
“It's a massive investment in both time and money to make sure that we haven't just come and started selling cars. We've set the foundations of that network so that we make sure that when a customer decides to buy the car, we can deliver the whole way through.”
Harris says retaining customers isn’t about brand loyalty for Chery, but about having earned trust.
“We need to make sure that as a brand and in conjunction with our dealers, we deliver on that ownership promise because ultimately we won't survive long term if everyone only buys our vehicles once,” he said.
“It’s not so much about people being loyal to a brand; it's more that we should earn their trust and their confidence so that when it is time for them to change their car again, we've earned the right to be seriously considered.”
A born-and-bred newshound, Kathryn has worked her way up through the ranks reporting for, and later editing, two renowned UK regional newspapers and websites, before moving on to join the digital newsdesk of one of the world’s most popular newspapers – The Sun. More recently, she’s done a short stint in PR in the not-for-profit sector, and led the news team at Wheels Media.
