Back in June, Chery's UK story looked like a simple negotiation over a spare production line at Nissan. Not anymore. Late in the autumn of 2026, Chery will open its own R&D centre at UTAC Millbrook in Bedfordshire — and this is no formality. First on the agenda: tuning cars for British roads. Then autonomous driving and AI.
Gary Lan, CEO of Chery International UK, called the new facility “the next step in our long-term plan for the UK.” He added a line that carries two decades of impatience: “We have waited more than 20 years for the right moment to enter this market, and our ambitions have always gone far beyond simply importing cars here.”
Behind those words sits a very real number. In July, Chery together with Omoda and Jaecoo grabbed almost 8% of the British market — up from roughly 3% a year earlier. That growth didn't happen by accident: the engineering centre isn't a PR gesture, it lets the company calibrate cars for specific roads and market requirements before committing to full-scale production.
The manufacturing side of the story, though, is still up in the air. On June 3, Nissan and Chery International UK signed a non-binding memorandum to explore contract assembly of Chery vehicles at the Sunderland plant. Nissan has only mentioned the possibility of starting Line One production in the 2027 financial year — talks are ongoing, and claiming Chery's UK manufacturing is already locked in would be premature.
This is where the new R&D centre changes the story. Two months ago Chery was just scouting a production site; now it's building its own engineering infrastructure in the country. If the Nissan memorandum turns into a contract, product development and calibration will sit closer to future assembly than under the usual scheme of exporting finished cars from China, according to Tarantas News.
The next checkpoint isn't the Bedfordshire office opening — it's turning the Nissan-Chery memorandum into a binding manufacturing agreement, complete with named models, output volume and a firm Line One launch date. The companies haven't disclosed any of that yet.
