This Chinese brand won't follow Kia, Hyundai and GWM's lead and hire local experts to fine-tune its cars for Australian taste

Chery won’t follow the lead of Hyundai, Kia and now GWM and hire local expertise to make its cars better suited to Australian tastes and conditions.

The Chinese automotive giant, which has also launched its Jaecoo and Omoda brands in Australia, has no plans to engage in an extensive ride and handling test program just for our market, despite revealing plans to do such a program for Europe.

Speaking to CarsGuide, Peter Matkin, Chery’s Director of Engineering for International Programs, said while the auto giant is planning to re-tune its cars for European conditions, that setup should be suitable for Australian buyers as individually tailoring to each market would be too complex and costly.

“I mean,  it depends on how many markets you're in… I mean, for us Europe is our next biggest market, and so far we've effectively just transplanted the Chinese specification to the other markets with some small adaptations like ADAS, or something like that,” Matkin said.

“But now we moved to Europe, it's much more critical to tune the car for that market because of its history, because of the customer base, and very much so because of the speed that we have in Europe; autobahns are unlimited, so 160 to 180km/h is normal.

“And it's the same for the B-roads, country lanes are much more twisty and we don't have any of that in China. Everything's just straight and it's just flat. So for me a huge push now is we have to tune in Europe, so we tuned for Omoda, for Jaecoo and now we're in the process of tuning for some of the other brands.”

This is despite the success of both Hyundai and Kia in the Australian market, which saw significant sales growth after they began local ride and handling programs.

GWM became the first Chinese brand to make a major move in this area of development, hiring former Holden engineer Rob Trubiani as its Product Engineering Director. He is expected to bring decades of local ride, handling and consumer preference knowledge to GWM to make its cars more appealing to buyers.

But Matkin isn’t convinced of the merits of local tuning, dismissing it as a marketing exercise for some brands while potentially adding significant production complexity with different suspension and steering parts required to achieve different handling for different markets.

“In some markets it's a pure marketing thing… it's a bit of a marketing tool, but from a pure engineering point of view, you can't go and adapt in every single different market,” he said. “We can't have 20 different damper tunes, you know, it doesn't make any sense to have that many.

“And it's not going to cost less, you know, you put a different shim in the damper for one market versus another, it's still the same price. It's not more expensive, but just from a complexity point of view, you can't have 20 different dampers, and you don't need to have 20 different dampers. You just have one for these markets, and you have a different one for the other markets and it works. It's fine.”

But that doesn’t mean Chery, Jaecoo and Omoda will ignore the needs of Australian customers. Matkin revealed that he would like to undertake a more extensive final validation drive for each new model before they are signed off for sale here.

“So it doesn't necessarily mean we have to tune here, because the road system's not so dissimilar in Europe,” he said.

“So it wouldn't matter whether we're tuned here or there, but it's good to do. One of the parts of what we're doing in Europe is this final sign-off, which is a little bit more of a drive, it's up to a 30,000km drive in Europe in different countries. There's no reason why we shouldn't do that here either. And again, for me, it's a big push to get more cars into the market just as a final assessment before we launch. So make sure that everything works as it should do.”