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. Interesting is that Chery was only granted a production license for passenger cars in 2003, which means Chery cars couldn't be legally sold until 2001. Until then Chery was officially only producing automotive components, albeit in a fully assembled form. In 2001 Chery solved the problem by piggybacking on a SAIC Motor license, China's largest state-owned car manufacturer. Chery surely knowns the way around the law... After rising tensions between Chery Automobile and General Motors (GM) and Volkswagen, two of SAIC's joint venture partners, the 20% ownership SAIC once held in Chery was sold. GM was not amused and filed lawsuits after Chery copied their Spark (Matiz) and Epica (Evanda/Magnus) models. Volkswagen also planned a lawsuit against Chery, because they apparently secretly purchased the Seat Toledo blueprints, which is quite interesting considering Seat is a subsidiary of Volkswagen...

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...