CHERY has been talking up a 1,200km (NEDC) range figure for its latest plug-in hybrid (PHEV) models.
To put that number on the record, it ran a long-haul media drive out of Kuala Lumpur a month or so ago.
The weather, however, turned it into a monsoon-season reality check, with heavy rain and flood alerts arriving uninvited.
The Tiggo 7 PHEV and Tiggo 8 PHEV convoy still managed to complete an anti-clockwise loop to Kuala Terengganu, across to Penang, then back through Ipoh, with a scout team going ahead to check closures and flood-prone stretches.
It felt less like event choreography and more like late-year risk management.
The aim is not subtle. This is an economy run built around Chery Super Hybrid (CSH) and its claim of up to 1,200km on one full tank and a full battery.
It is the sort of trip few owners would plan, but plenty would appreciate when a balik kampung week turns into a long cross-peninsula run.
Discipline required
To give both locally assembled PHEVs their best shot, the convoy stayed in Eco and kept speeds sensible.
It did not mean crawling along at 60kph for fun, but it did mean driving with restraint.
We were handed the bigger Tiggo 8 PHEV for the job. Momentum mattered.
So did looking far ahead, lifting early, and letting regeneration do what it could when traffic and terrain allowed.
Real-world complications still arrived on schedule. Heavy rain shortened sightlines. B-road traffic broke the rhythm.
Lorries and buses applied pressure in gaps that did not always exist.
Even so, one Tiggo 8 PHEV in the run posted 1,227km, edging past the 1,200km headline, while returning the best average fuel consumption of 3.6 l/100km among the six-car convoy of two Tiggo 7s and four Tiggo 8s.
The useful takeaway is not that “1,227km is easy”, because it is not.
It is that a 7-seat family SUV could stretch a full tank and a full charge far enough to cut, or even skip, a refuelling stop on a long interstate run if it is driven with care.
What made it possible
The Tiggo 8 PHEV pairs a 1.5-litre turbocharged direct-injection engine with Chery’s dedicated hybrid transmission (DHT) and a front-wheel drive layout.
It uses an 18.3kWh lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery and a 60-litre fuel tank, the two numbers that made the long-range possibility a reality.
Chery listed combined outputs at 279PS and 365Nm, with the engine at 143PS/215Nm and the electric motor at 204PS/310Nm.
Charging matters more here than it usually does in PHEV talk.
The Tiggo 8 PHEV supports up to 40kW DC charging (30%–80% in 19 minutes) and 6.6kW AC charging (30%–80% in three hours), with a 3-pin overnight option quoted at about 8.5 hours.
In day-to-day terms, that makes it easier to treat the car as electric-first when you can plug in, with petrol in reserve when you cannot.
Chery quotes up to 90km of electric-only driving in its material.
Expect less if you drive briskly, run heavy air-conditioning, or spend your day in traffic, which is why the convoy result came with a discipline caveat.
A 7-seater first
The Tiggo 8 PHEV remains a family-first SUV in the way it goes about its work.
You feel the extra mass of the plug-in hardware, and it is happiest when you keep things smooth rather than chase pace.
Packaging remains the core appeal: three rows, long-haul intent, and the prospect of fewer fuel stops when you criss-cross the peninsula.
Price also sets its stall, at RM159,800 for the Tiggo 8 PHEV.
The number in context
A 1,200km claim used to sound heroic. In early 2026, it sits in a widening range contest among PHEV makers.
For perspective, at the far end of the spectrum, Guinness World Records lists the Hongqi HS6 PHEV at 2,327.343km for the longest journey by a plug-in hybrid production SUV without refuelling or recharging.
That is not a like-for-like rival to a 7-seat Tiggo 8 PHEV, but it shows how quickly the numbers game is moving.
That does not make the Chery result any less relevant. It simply makes it easier to judge.
The Tiggo 8 PHEV does not need a record to be useful.
It needs to reduce hassle on trips regular people actually do, in weather that increasingly refuses to cooperate.
And the Tiggo 7 PHEV?
The Tiggo 7 PHEV brings the same CSH plug-in logic in a five-seat package at RM129,800, currently Malaysia’s most affordable new PHEV.
If you do not need a third row, it reads as the simpler daily choice, while still giving you the option of long legs when the trip stretches out. Enuf said.
