English: Place: Liping, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province

Chinese name: 奇瑞QQ (qíruì QQ) Year of launch: 2003

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 infamous Chery QQ is a copy of the Daewoo Matiz or Chevrolet Spark as it was known in China. It could be seen as one of the icons of the relatively young Chinese automotive history. It once was the Chinese car with the highest cumulative sales. Until today over 1.4 million examples should have been sold in China only, including the in-house designed QQ6 five-door liftback based on the same platform and the second generation model, which was launched in 2013. The first generation model was discontinued a couple of years ago, since the demand for small city cars shrunk significantly in the last years. The QQ was renamed QQ3 in 2006 to distinguish it from the QQ6, launched in the same year.