'Irrelevant': Chery dismisses local tuning

Chery’s local Chief Operating Officer Lucas Harris said the brand doesn’t need to tune its cars in Australia to get a better result.

Harris said a local ride and handling program, like the one currently being undertaken by GWM at the former Holden proving ground in Lang Lang, was unnecessary for its cars.

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“The natural thing your colleagues talk about is ride and handling, right?” Harris said. “But it’s not just ride and handling, ADAS [active safety equipment] is also important, because a lot of that technology is so new, but does that need to be done in Australia to make it suitable for Australia? No.”

“I think as long as we have the intelligent and educated input, whether we do that work in China or Europe or North America is irrelevant.”

“As long as the request is right of the spec we want and how we want it to behave and then a local validation of whether we got what we asked for. You don’t need a facility here to do that.”

When asked how specific the tune on Chery models developed to Australia can be — as in whether the cars have a market or region-specific tune, Harris said he was not across that detail, but was aware that some cars “definitely” sync up with the tune of their European counterparts.

“We’ve got the R&D out of Germany and I was speaking to someone the other day about the ride and handling of the cars out of Germany, right, and the comment was made ‘Oh but you know the roads in Germany are obviously different from the roads here.’”

“And they said ‘there are some neighbouring countries which I won’t name but when we drive the cars and test them there, I can tell you now the roads aren’t as pristine as they are in Germany.’ So I think there’s an acknowledgement of what [the ride] needs to be.”

“There’s some great vehicles which come out of Europe with ride, handling and dynamic performance which are excellent, and they weren’t developed in Australia.”

Chery has been quick to respond to localisation criticism in the past. When the original Omoda 5 small SUV launched it was heavily criticised for its overbearing active safety suite, which quickly received a software update to address its flaws.

In addition, the brand has done significant work to make its one-derided dual-clutch automatics smoother to shift and more user-friendly.

Previously, Chery’s global head of engineering, David Lu, told CarsGuide at least some form of local tuning or validation is a “must” for every market the brand launches in.

He even went so far as to say Australia is a good market to do “specific versions” of some vehicles in its range, without getting into detail on what that might look like.

“Australia is a good market - it can be a frontier to the USA market, so we’ll see how we can leverage that,” Lu said at the time. “One of my purposes for being here is seeing how we can work with people here [on tuning the cars].”

Harris has said in the past that the upcoming Chery ute, which is expected to be based on the Rely P3X recently revealed in China, has been doing extensive testing in Australia ahead of its arrival.

The ute, which also may launch with an industry-first diesel hybrid powertrain in Australia, is due before the end of 2026.

Chery will have its hands full in 2026 launching more new models, the Lepas sub-brand, and expanding its workshop and dealer footprint in a bid to solidify a top-10 position in the market, which it is currently just shy of in 2025.