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Heu2019s also the deputy head of the digital automotive hub where he looks after the ownership team, so he has a keen interest in how motorists can save money on running their car.nLike most who appear on these pages, Tomu2019s relationship with cars started many years ago in a childhood filled with trips to Thruxton and thinking the two successive family Toyota Tercels were more common than they really were.nUnlike most here, though, he isnu2019t talented with a spanner or a racing steering wheel in hand but he has spent much of his career writing about the more nitty-gritty elements of the car industry. He started his journalism career back in 2008 on company car magazine BusinessCar and his odd interest in the automotive tax system remains. 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Meet the Brit teaching Chinese makers to be more JLR
► Chery sets up a base in the UK to develop cars
► Will tune chassis and drive-assistance settings
► Based at Millbrook, opens in Autumn 2026
Chinese manufacturer Chery has made a big commitment to its UK customers with the announcement that it is opening a research and development centre in Bedfordshire. The brand has talked about sending engineers to different locations due to the specific demands of those markets, and it has made good on that promise with the new site.
The R&D centre will be at the UTAC Millbrook proving ground and is due to open in late autumn 2026. Initially it will focus on chassis dynamics and the tuning and calibration of the ADAS safety systems. It will factor in the UK customers’ preference for more responsive suspension and steering systems as well as the road network’s many roundabouts, narrow roads, traffic levels and varied road surfaces.
Chery says that it has already factored some UK customer feedback into the setup of its cars, but this facility will allow the gap between insight and development to close.
Multi-brand base
Chery is planning to use its Millbrook facility to help develop models across multiple brands, with the company currently offering OMODA, JAECOO, Chery and Lepas in the UK. It has yet to confirm exactly which brands will operate from Millbrook initially, though, with that announcement due to follow.
In future we should also see new jobs created too, in the fields of engineering, autonomous driving and AI. It is all part of an approach that Chery is calling: ‘In somewhere, For somewhere, Be somewhere.’ This consistent messaging has been present throughout the process of launching the firm’s brands in the UK.
We met up with Chery’s head of engineering, Peter Matkin, at the launch of Lepas, where he spoke about how he has been pressing the need for this.
European insight for a Chinese brand
Matkin is open, approachable, light-hearted, enthusiastic and – crucially for Chery – armed with 15 years of engineering experience working at Jaguar Land Rover, so he knows what makes European car makers tick. He has been with Chery for 11 years and spends a good amount of his time trying to convince his engineers to look outside of China when it comes to chassis development. ‘They don’t understand what I’m talking about! They think something is wrong with me!’, he said.
‘So much of the infrastructure is new, so roads are just straight and flat. We don’t go over mountains; we go through them. We don’t go into the valley; we go over it. All the roads are just straight and it’s a grid system in cities… there are speed cameras everywhere.
‘So this is why I invite a lot of the engineers to different locations,’ he adds. ‘All the beautiful roads in the Alps, or in the UK… let them experience what it’s like going 180 on the autobahn in Germany where a truck pulls out in front of you. Get them to drive at 100km/h on an unlit road that’s full of twists and bends and hills.’
Chinese cars that launch in Europe are regularly better value or come with more technology, but many are dynamically poor. It’s a ‘huge push’ for Matkin. He believes education is key – not just to make the cars more enjoyable to drive, but to make them safer too.
Safety centric approach
He’s also encouraging better calibration of driver assistance technology – sometimes seen as an area in which Chinese cars are over-zealous.
‘Acceleration and deceleration for adaptive cruise control can be so frustrating,’ says Matkin. ‘In China, everything is safety first – they’re so risk averse. When you get on the metro, for example, you go through an airport security system where your bags are checked and your hands are up.
‘We have to keep saying: “Hey, customers don’t want all of this intrusion. They want to keep going, keep moving, stop slowing down.’’ So we’ve set up a couple of projects with some universities in Europe, as well as some of the engineering service providers here, so that we can deliver better calibration.’
Many markets would be perfectly happy with cars in Chinese spec – but not Europe, he says. ‘The customer knows what a good car is. You can’t cheat them.’
Around 60 per cent of a car bound for international markets is carried over, 30 per cent is adapted ‘to meet European standards and requirements’ and the remaining 10 per cent is engineered locally in Europe before heading to dealer forecourts.
‘This last 10 per cent is to try and make sure we’re fully meeting the European consumer and what they aspire to,’ says Matkin, accompanied by a flourish on the harp.
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