Chery Tiggo 8 vs Suzuki E-Vitara

What's the difference?

A bargain price, clever hybrid system, and a spacious interior with useful third row is a rare and potent combination which should continue to catapult Chery into a successful future.

Sure, the dull driving dynamics, sometimes befuddling software, and over reliance on touchscreens could and should be addressed, but at this price and with these ownership terms, the Tiggo 8 Super Hybrid is a tough proposition to argue with.

Note: CarsGuide attended this event as a guest of the manufacturer, with accommodation and meals provided.

The Suzuki e Vitara is a fun, if unusual little electric car, but it does come at a price premium over many of its rivals, which includes the likes of the Kia EV3 and Hyundai Kona.

It’s great to drive, has a versatile cabin, and has a familiar feel for anyone new to electric cars. However, with low driving range, slow charging, no vehicle-to-load or single-pedal driving and comparatively high service costs, it may be a tall order.

Some will prefer that it wears a Japanese badge on its nose compared to budget alternatives, but I’m not sure Suzuki will be selling these in the kinds of volumes it needs to at this price.

Unlike some of its rivals in this space, the Tiggo 8 has a fairly generic boxy SUV design. It’s not as interesting as many of its rivals, but it also strays away from being controversial.

The derivative grille design and light signatures make it blend into traffic nicely, making it an ideal SUV for someone who intentionally doesn’t want to stand out, at least not in quite the same way as something like the BYD Sealion 6.

There’s also nothing that looks proportionally off about it, and the strong lines and spoiler piece over the rear give it a (very) faint air of toughness.

Inside this plug-in hybrid version gets a significantly different interior compared to the combustion Tiggo 8 that launched in 2024. The design is much more contemporary, dominated by the huge central touchscreen which is much bigger than the one in both the Tiggo 7 and the combustion Tiggo 8, and there’s new switchgear for the indicator stalk and for the steering wheel buttons, too.

Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of the climate shortcut panel which remains in the Tiggo 7. Instead, you’re forced to navigate through new software which has a dedicated climate zone.

Still, it’s a glitzy looking interior with big screens and interesting material choices, particularly at this price. The Tiggo 8 even manages to avoid some of the blatant Mercedes-Benz worship as seen in the smaller Tiggo 7, and the synthetic seat trim is also distinct from the rest of the Chery range. In this plug-in Tiggo 8 it’s a kind of sturdy-feeling neoprene finish which looks a little bit like suede. It’s weird, but I don’t hate it.

The e Vitara is an odd looking car, with a super upright front and rear combining with sharp motifs across its blocky body.

It’s a departure from anything Suzuki has done before, with only echoes of the current Vitara combustion SUV at the front.

It moves Suzuki into new styling territory with the contemporary angular design feeling more similar to the Kia EV3 rather than the more curvy, contemporary designs seen on some of its more affordable Chinese competition.

The interior updates bring Suzuki into the current decade, with more screens, better software, and a more swish design compared to the increasingly dated interiors of its combustion models.

It has a more conservative approach than some newer names to the Australian market, with comparatively tame screens, the existence of actual buttons for some climate functions, and familiar switchgear, like traditional indicator stalks and a rotary-style shifter.

In fact, the shifter and some of the other buttons seem to be shared components with Toyota, because they are the same as what you might find in the bZ4X, for better or worse.

The software is basic. It features a handful of screens with little depth to the info on offer. However, it is quick to respond, and the dashboard offers a degree of customisation in its layouts. 

Even if it’s not quite the stellar software offering that you might see in a Tesla, it’s the best software Suzuki has offered and it seems to just work without being distracting, so that’s something at least.

The Tiggo 8’s cabin is enormous and has had various upgrades since the combustion car launched that make it both easier and less easy to use.

For example, the centre console redesign is more contemporary, offering pride of place to the wireless phone charging bay, offering two larger bottle holders off to one side. Some key driver functions appear on the right-hand side, including a drive mode selector dial and a handful of shortcuts for the most basic climate functions, like an auto AC button and front and rear defoggers.

This means the shifter has moved to the column on the right-hand side, with a multifunction stalk for the indicators and wipers on the left instead.

The armrest console box is an overcomplicated split opening design, but offers plenty of room inside. There are two large bottle holders and pockets in each front door, too, and there’s a large pass-through area underneath the bridge-style console which will be great for a handbag or something.

The seating position is quite adjustable, but you sit unusually high in the car, which makes it feel as though you’re peering down on the instruments.

As already mentioned, the full array of climate functions can only be controlled through the touchscreen, with no physical buttons outside of the handful on the centre console. Would it be so hard just to have a temperature and fan speed dial you don’t have to take your eyes off the road?

The software itself is typical of many Chinese cars at the moment. It looks good, but isn’t as functional or easy to use as you’d like. Some core functions are still buried in confusingly labelled sub-menus, particularly things like active safety features. It’s not the worst I’ve used (the Leapmotor C10 springs to mind), but it should be better given the massive screen is such a focal point of the cabin.

At least the Tiggo 8 doesn’t feel cheap in other areas, with generous soft-touch materials throughout the cabin. It might be fake leather and suede, but it does a good enough job of making the cabin feel plush and comfortable for longer journeys.

The second row is impressive. I had leagues of room in all dimensions behind my front seat position at 182cm tall. The generous amount of soft trims continue and the seat bases are comfortable enough, too. Storage comes in the form of seat-back pockets and large bottle holders in each door.

Maybe the most impressive feature is the third row. While I felt squashed into the rear row of the Mitsubishi Outlander, the Tiggo 8 offers just enough space for an adult to travel in some form of comfort. Access isn’t the easiest, but there’s so much space in the second row the the seat can slide forward to allow sufficient room for my legs. My head touches the roof, however.

There’s not much in the way of amenities back there, with a bottle holder and storage tray for third-row occupants, as well as a 12-volt outlet in the boot.

The boot itself seems large enough, although at the time of writing there was no official boot figure. For context, the combustion version offers 479 litres with the third row down, or 117 litres with it up, and this plug-in doesn’t seem significantly different to my eye.

Unfortunately though, the placement of the battery and DC inverter under the boot floor leaves no room for a spare. There’s only an inflator kit.

There’s major pros and cons for the e Vitara on the practicality front. In some ways it’s a smart and pragmatic cabin, in other ways it leaves a lot to be desired.

Up front the seats are an easy win. Nicely bolstered with good padding, they’re surprisingly comfortable on a long drive despite a high seat base and interesting material choices.

Ergonomically, I felt as though the seating position was a bit high. It feels like an ‘early’ EV in that sense, with the batteries clearly taking up floor space. For shorter people, this will be a good thing, with the car offering a commanding view of the road, but it doesn't feel quite right for me.

The cabin offers ease of access to all the key controls, with physical toggles for the climate unit and a dial for volume. There are some buttons on the steering wheel for adjusting the digital instruments and key cruise functions, but no paddle shifters for controlling regenerative braking.

The centre console is the biggest design blunder. The raised bridge piece is almost entirely gloss plastic, which is impossible to keep clean and will scratch over time. The controls are also chunky, taking up a lot of real estate in this essential location. They could easily have been compressed down to a smaller area with more storage on offer instead.

The padded armrest is too low and too far back. It could have had adjustable height and reach where it sits, and could have offered more storage underneath as well.

To the e Vitara’s credit, there’s a set of two very nice cupholders up front, but using them with a bottle will block access to the physical climate controls and limit access to the wireless charger.

There’s also a tray beneath that houses the 12v, USB-A and USB-C ports, but it’s a bit too height-limited for larger items like handbags. It's finished in a scratchy plastic so loose objects slide around. There are large bottle holders with dividers in each of the front doors.

The rear seat continues with the nice seat trim and offers quite an impressive amount of legroom in its default position. The floor is flat, too, so the centre position is useful enough in terms of space to put your feet. Each door has a bottle holder and there’s a pocket on the back of the passenger seat. The centre seat folds down to make for a padded armrest with two cupholders.

However, there are no power outlets for rear passengers, nor are there adjustable air vents. The headliner and window tint back there is also dark, making the space feel claustrophobic, and the high seat bases combine with a tight roofline (blame the sunroof) to make for a space I only just fit into, despite ample leg room. 

The boot also feels small, but the e Vitara has a trick up its sleeve. With just 238 litres in its default configuration, it’s a small but oblong cargo area, but it swallowed our small and large CarsGuide travel cases. The second seating row is on rails and can move forward to nearly double the available volume. In this position, which would only leave enough space for small children or pets, the boot can absorb the whole three-piece luggage set with space to spare.

There’s a small amount of additional storage under the floor, good for charging cables, although there’s no spare wheel, only a tyre repair kit.

A lack of full-size power outlet or vehicle-to-load discharge system is a notable omission for an electric vehicle in 2026. There’s also no frunk, with the entire under-bonnet area taken up by high-voltage and battery cooling gear.

The e Vitara isn’t off to a good start on the pricing front. This small electric SUV starts from $49,000, which is a drive-away price at the time of writing. This already strikes it out of the value leagues, nowhere close to the sub-$40,000 starting price of China-sourced alternatives like the Leapmotor B10, Jaecoo J5 or BYD Atto 2.

Instead, the e Vitara plays in the big mainstream price leagues with the Kia EV3, Hyundai Kona Electric or even the MG S5, and even then the Ultra all-wheel drive we sampled for this review has an eye-watering $9000 price jump over the base Motion 2WD variant.

This pitches it against the most expensive versions of the EV3 and Kona, and in the same pricing league as the Volvo EX30, all three of which offer a significantly higher electric driving range.

We’ll get more into that later, but the spec sheet for the e Vitara at this price reads more like that of a combustion car, rather than a new-age EV.

Highlights include the futuristic 18-inch alloy wheels, auto high beam LED headlights, multi-tone sports seats with electric adjust for the driver, heated front seats, a premium sound system and an opening sunroof.

It also scores a 10.1-inch multimedia touchscreen with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, a 10.25-inch digital instrument cluster, and ambient lighting which makes it feel a bit more swish at night.

It’s good stuff typical of a mainstream brand, but at significantly less money, rivals from China are offering larger screens and more features.

Plus, while you’re getting a Japanese brand badge, the e Vitara is actually built in India alongside its Toyota relation, the Urban Cruiser, which we’re unlikely to see in Australia.

Chery’s Super Hybrid system is a little different from other plug-ins on the market. It pairs a 1.5-litre four-cylinder turbocharged engine (105kW/215Nm) with a ‘dedicated hybrid transmission’ (DHT). This is a transaxle which contains a large electric motor (150kW/310Nm) and uses a set of clutches and gears to blend the power sources.

The end result of this is a drivetrain that feels a bit like a CVT but isn’t the much derided rubber-band-on-a-cone set-up. To Chery’s credit, it almost feels like driving an electric vehicle, such is the relatively smooth power delivery and seamless blending of the power sources depending on speed.

Just don’t expect to tow much more than a tinny as capacity is limited to just 750kg.

The e Vitara Ultra impresses when it comes to its drive hardware. With 135kW/307Nm it’s punchy for a small SUV, with the 0-100km/h sprint time officially measured at 7.4 seconds.

It feels faster to get to 60 though, with a big surge of torque instantly available. This Ultra grade features a dual-motor all-wheel-drive set-up, and even has specific traction settings for off-road scenarios, making it theoretically more capable than some of its rivals.

The Tiggo 8 has a headline electric driving range of 95km, although this is rated to the more lenient NEDC cycle. Usually you can expect more like 75km in the real world, but these plug-ins tend to vary greatly from their official figures for better or worse, so stay tuned for a longer test to see what the real-world figure is.

Regardless, it draws this range from a 18.3kWh battery pack, that is capable of charging up on both DC and AC, which is rare for a plug-in. On the faster DC chargers, it is capable of topping up at a maximum rate of 40kW for a claimed 30 to 80 per cent charge in 20 minutes. Combined range, using a full tank of fuel and full charge can have the vehicle travel up to a claimed 1200km.

The overall fuel efficiency is 1.3L/100km, a somewhat useless figure. The actual figure will depend entirely on how you use the car. Have a short commute and charge at least at one end of it? It may as well be zero.

What’s particularly clever though is how Chery has put significant work into the software map of the hybrid transmission to keep it as efficient as possible, even when the battery is drained. 

The vehicles we tested on the launch were all hovering around the mid-5.0L/100km mark, even with the batteries long drained to their reserve level. The brand’s engineering people say the software map is specifically designed to achieve less than 6.0L/100km even when the battery is dead.

Again, not every plug-in hybrid can claim the same.

This all-wheel-drive set-up comes at a significant cost. The e Vitara Ultra has a WLTP driving range of 395km and an official energy consumption of 16.5kWh/100km. Far from the 500km-plus range of some of its rivals.

But the story gets worse. While I tend to pull close to if not occasionally more than the official driving range from Hyundai and Kia models, the e Vitara fell well short of its quoted range in my testing.

While not a scientific test by any means, I drove it in regular city driving conditions with some freeway jaunts. The projected range my car was indicating on the dash was just 295km.

While the Toyota bZ4X is fairly notorious for keeping a huge emergency range reserve which impacts its overall driving range, 100km less than the claim is simply not acceptable.

It also overshot its energy consumption significantly, with the car indicating 17.9kWh/100km, which I would expect from an EV a full size bracket above this.

Compounding these issues is the sub-par charging speed. 70kW was once okay for a 61kWh battery, but is now behind the pace, with most rivals quoting 100kW of peak DC charging speed or significantly more.

As such it takes about 45 minutes to charge the e Vitara Ultra from 10-80 per cent, which is well behind the 20-30 minutes of many of its rivals. At least the AC charging speed is an acceptable 11kW.

The Tiggo 8 leans into the traits on display in the smaller Tiggo 7. This means a too-high seating position trading driver ergonomics for visibility, a vague steering tune defined far too much by software, and an overly soft ride quality.

There are various trade-offs here, but it’s about the opposite of a driver’s car. The steering lends hardly any feel to what’s going on at the wheels, and the floaty ride conspires with the tall seat base to feel a bit disconcerting when cornering at high speed.

However, the positives include ease of use and relative comfort. The steering is light enough to make the Tiggo 8 pretty manoeuvrable at low speeds, and the soft ride has the Tiggo 8 floating over road imperfections with relative ease.

It’s also quick, with the electric motor providing urgent acceleration, but this is somehow not very engaging or fun regardless. Plus, slamming the accelerator down, particularly in Sport mode, will overwhelm the front tyres.

This car maintains over 20 per cent of its total battery capacity in reserve, in order to have a large buffer to draw from in hybrid mode to facilitate the smooth electric driving, but this also allows more room to store regenerated energy from idle time or braking compared to a plugless hybrid.

It seems to drive as an EV most of the time, although it lacks a true one-pedal driving mode despite having three levels of regenerative braking.

The cabin is impressively quiet, particularly at lower speeds. It’s genuinely hard to tell when the combustion engine is on to assist the electric driving functions, and the standard acoustic glass keeps most of the nasty ambient noise out. However, at speeds above 80km/h, road noise eventually finds its way into the cabin.

There are many rivals that provide an overall better balance of driving dynamics and handling with comfort, but this Tiggo 8 shoots for a more comfort-oriented family buyer who just wants a quiet and fuel-efficient SUV.

For all its flaws, the e Vitara is a nice car to drive. Unlike many of its rivals, the driving ergonomics and switchgear feel instantly familiar in this small SUV. You’re not met with an array of weird touch-based systems, strangely placed screens, or even annoying indicator stalks as you are in so many of this car’s rivals from newer brands.

It’s refreshingly straightforward when you hit the road, with more traditional assisted steering, standard pedal feel and nicely blended or near-single-pedal regenerative braking, depending on how you set it.

The e Vitara in Ultra trim with its dual-motor system is also alarmingly rapid, at least to the 60km/h mark, with its raised body lurching forward with some urgency when you stomp on the accelerator.

It’s not like any Suzuki you’ve driven before, that’s for sure.

Despite this impressive sprint ability, things are kept under control with smart traction software and halfway decent tyres keeping things civilised. There’s no violent torque-steer trying to rip the steering wheel out of your hands, or pure tyre torture you get from some EVs in this class.

The ride is comfortable, too. It's not as harsh as the likes of the Tesla Model Y, for example, but it’s also not too spongy like many China-sourced rivals.

Day-to-day it absorbs harsher road imperfections in its stride, and handles cornering with surprising grace, despite what feels like a tall ride height. Its biggest ride flaw is long undulations in the road, which give the car an unsettling floating feeling at certain cadences, as the weight of the battery starts to pendulum.

For the most part though, the e Vitara is refreshingly straightforward and feels familiar to drive, which should keep fans of the brand and those looking for a more traditional Japanese car drive experience pleased.

The array of active safety kit present on the e Vitara is also nicely tuned, with key systems like auto emergency braking (AEB), lane-keep assist, and blind-spot monitoring all well-calibrated and not needing to be turned off like a lot of this car’s more affordable rivals.

The adaptive cruise control proved to be compliant in my time with the car.

The Suzuki has seven airbags and a four-star ANCAP safety rating, which should still make it a very safe car. It's also, somehow, the highest-scoring current Suzuki model.

The Tiggo 8 Super Hybrid is covered by seven years and unlimited kilometres of warranty, seven years of roadside assist, and seven years of capped-price servicing, following the successful formula of once-underdog Kia.

The servicing price varies year on year according to the capped-price schedule, between $299 and a particularly expensive service at the 90,000km mark which costs $1291.31.

The average yearly cost works out to $453.45 if you keep the car for the full seven-year duration. Not the cheapest we’ve ever seen, but all things considered, it’s pretty good.

Suzuki offers a five-year, unlimited kilometre warranty, which is outpaced by all of its rivals from China and most of its rivals from Japan.

The e Vitara needs to see a workshop once every 12 months or 20,000km and comes with five years of roadside assistance to match the warranty.

The brand’s genuine service program covers five years or 100,000km, with costs for this Ultra variant varying between $289 and $799 per visit, coming in at a surprisingly expensive yearly average of $503. There are combustion cars with more moving parts that are cheaper to run.

An average fast DC charge session (10-80 per cent at 60c per kWh) will cost around $21.60, while an off-peak at-home charge (at 16c per kWh) of the same amount will cost $5.76.