Omoda 5 Comfort: What’s in a name?

Author: Sean O'Grady

Published: Jan, 25 2025 06:00

For a car no one has heard of, this neat SUV crossover is well worth a test drive, says Sean O’Grady. Oh. An Omoda. What’s that then? People ask me this even when the letters O M O D A are prominently spread across the proud snout of the latest entrant into the overcrowded SUV crossover segment.

Image Credit: The Independent [The styling of this model is more distinctive than the utterly generic EV ‘face’ of the E5]

More explication needed. It’s a Chery. No? OK, well, Chery is one of those Chinese car company giants that you’ve probably never heard of, rather like BYD or Great Wall, or FAW or Dongfeng, Geely, SAIC... As it happens, Chery is one of the smaller of the hundred flowers that the Chinese Communist Party lets bloom in the country’s burgeoning automotive sector, and builds “only” about 2.6 million vehicles a year, which is more than double the total UK figure.

Image Credit: The Independent [What’s an Omoda, then? Try one and you can find out]

The company, owned by the Chinese state, also has a joint venture with Jaguar Land Rover, owned by Tata of India, and the Korean Group KGM, formerly SsangYong. Somewhere in that mix another global automotive giant is gestating. “Chery” is hardly a more familiar name to European car buyers than “Omoda”, and clearly they didn’t think it had much export potential – being a little reminiscent of the Datsun/Nissan Cherry from a past motoring age, and properly pronounced more like “sherry”.

Image Credit: The Independent [The Omoda is more spacious than, say, the Peugeot electric e-2008]

“I drive a sherry” is indeed likely to provoke mirth; “I drive an Omoda”, less so. It’s one of those bland, globally inoffensive made-up names that the brand professionals invent, like Mondeo or Hobnobs, in an effort to avert the fate that befell the Toyota MR2 sports car when they tried to sell it in France, or the Mitsubishi Pajero in Spain (I’ll leave you to google those). Will it work?.

Image Credit: The Independent [The electric E5 has a ‘pet mode’ button, which will maintain an ambient temperature of 13C inside the car]

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Omoda 5 Comfort: What’s in a name?

Omoda 5 Comfort: What’s in a name?

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