Place: Liping, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province
<p>Chinese name: 瑞麒G3 (ruìqí G3)
Year of launch: 2011
</p><p>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...
</p><p>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 Riich name confusingly was initially used for a small bread van which was later part of the Karry range, but as a subbrand Riich was positioned as Chery's most upmarket brand. It had a range consisting of the small M1 hatchback, M5 liftback, X1 cross stationcar, G3 (an upmarket version of the Chery A5/Cowin 3, now known as Chery E5), the G5 (first shown as Chery A6 prototype) and G6. Some cars never made it into production, including the M3, G2 and gorgeous Z5 styled by Bertone. Many Chery dealerships that were forced to (exclusively) sell the Riich and Rely brand went bankrupt. Chery/Riich sold 1,246 units in 2011, then 12,108 in its first full year 2012, but then dramatically down to 783 units in 2013 and 338 in 2014.
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Sales figures: carsalesbase.com/china-car-sales-data/chery/chery-riich-g3/
Rutger van der Maar
CC BY 2.0
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