Volkswagen Caddy vs Chery Tiggo 4 PRO

What's the difference?

The venerable VW Caddy was launched in 1979 and after five generations and more than four decades of service, it remains one of the world’s most popular range of small vans.

In Australia’s light-commercial vehicle market, the Caddy’s work-focused Cargo model competes in the small van (under 2.5-tonne GVM) segment against the Renault Kangoo and Peugeot Partner.

The VW range offers Cargo (SWB), Cargo Maxi (LWB) and Crewvan (LWB) models with a unique choice of petrol/diesel engines and manual/auto transmissions.

We recently revisited this German workhorse to find out why it remains such a strong seller in Australia from a business perspective.

Chery would likely prefer you forget its initial foray into the Australian market, but doing so would do a disservice to the brand.

We don’t need to go into the nitty gritty of what went wrong back then, but needless to say the first Chery models of around 15 years ago were not particularly good.

Since its return in 2022 Chery is unrecognisable from that first attempt at cracking this market. The Omoda 5, the first model of its relaunch, was flawed but light years ahead of the earlier models in terms of design, presentation and build quality.

It has since expanded with the larger Tiggo 7 Pro and Tiggo 8 Pro Max SUVs and then in late 2024 it added this, the Tiggo 4 Pro. This is Chery’s answer to the likes of the Hyundai Venue, Mazda CX-30, Toyota Yaris Cross, etc in what’s known as the ‘light SUV’ segment.

Chery had a very good 2024, more than doubling its sales, so there are clear signs the brand is enjoying far greater success with its second attempt in Australia.

But is the Tiggo 4 Pro worth buying, if you’re in the market for a compact SUV? Let’s answer that question as we go through all the details.