English: Place: Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County, Liuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region

Chinese name: 奇瑞东方之子Cross (qíruì dōngfāng zhīzǐ Cross) Year of launch: 2006

Chery Automobile was the largest Chinese carmaker for quite some time, thanks to successes of the QQ, Tiggo, A5 and the old Windcloud/Flagcloud (Fulwin/Cowin) models. Chery is a state-owned company founded in 1997. It began automobile production in 1999 after acquiring toolings and a license to produce the first generation Seat Toledo.

The Cross Eastar, also known as Chery V5, was launched in 2006 and is a large MPV based on the Eastar sedan, a copy of the Chevrolet Epica (Daewoo/Chevrolet Evanda in Europe, Daewoo Magnus in South Korea). The Cross Eastar thankfully had its own look and only shares its platform with the sedan. It was sold with 2.0 and 2.4-litre Mitsubishi petrol engines, as well as a 1.9-litre common-rail turbodiesel engine. Chery had a terribly messy line-up after it launched three new sub brands in 2009, two of which completely failed: Rely, Riich (both now defunct) and Karry. The Chery V5/Cross Eastar was rebranded Rely V5. The car never sold well, with only 10,359 units in its peak year 2010. It did have small successes in export markets like Malaysia though. A heavily revamped version was launched in 2015 as the Chery Arrizo M7, but it was already dead in the water, it silently left the local market by the end of 2016, currently it is only produced for export markets. Sales information: carsalesbase.com/china-car-sales-data/chery/chery-rely-v5...

carsalesbase.com/china-car-sales-data/chery/chery-arrizo-m7/