What in the ever living fuck is an EBRO? Maybe if we open the glovebox of this rented beast we can….

Oh. Hello Chery. I wasn’t expecting you here!

It seems that in order to answer our question, we will need a bit of history and badge engineering. So buckle up consumers, we’ve got some absolutely phenomenal garbage for you today.

A Brief History Lesson

EBRO was what I can only describe as a “Spanish badge engineering company” in the early 1950s. They locally manufactured rebadged Alfa Romeo, SEAT, Jeep, and Ford trucks, vans, busses, and utility vehicle across several plants in Spain. They even made a tractor! At some point, EBRO became controlled by Motor Ibérica and then Nissan slowly gobbled them up by the 1980s. For a while, EBRO badged Nissan trucks and Patrols would roam the rural streets and job sites of Europe until Nissan dropped the name before the end of the decade.

Fast forwarding to 2021, when the Spanish company EV Motors (previously EcoPower Automotive and a whole assortment of other names) bought the trademark for EBRO. Soon after, they partnered with the Chinese company Chery to assembly their cars at an unused Spanish Nissan plant in order to get around EU Tariffs.

Moving to the present year of 2026 when EBRO, Chery, and everyone else involved are producing a car called the EBRO s800. Which is an almost exact copy of the Chery Tiggo 8. The only differences are the badges, some bumpers, and some backend software to make it work with European GPS and cell networks. Though I am not fully convinced about the software bit.

So… is it a Chinese car? Well it’s ‘built’ in Spain… kinda. Early versions were essentially rolling shells that got their bodies and engines installed on EU soil but now a days the EBRO factory receives a whole buncha bits (engines, body panels, chassis sheet metal, wiring) from China and then puts it all together. Supposedly, locally sourced materials are used as well. So Chinese steel is being held together by Spanish bolts. EBRO is around 60% owned by EV Motors and 40% owned by Chery. So it’s a Spanish assembled and rebodied Chery Tiggo 8. Cool let’s never think or talk about any of this again.

So what’s it like?

First Impressions

From the outside, it’s a derivative design. The front and rears borrow from Audi and Mercedes while the side profile seems a bit Toyota and Mitsubishi (though granted SUVs have all converged shapes as of late). It’s somehow very blandly its own thing and a simultaneously a mishmash of other. Personally, I don’t really care for the way it looks. The entire front end is some chimera abomination mix of everything wrong with modern car styling. The rear is meaningless, though the lights a kinda cool.

But exterior styling is subjective, and I dislike SUVs, so you’re free to make up your own opinions this one time as a little treat!

To its credit, the fit and finish of this bloat boat is that of any other regular automaker. Mostly. The hood never seemed to shut correctly but aside from that, nothing was falling off, rattling, and the body panels fit together fine. Quality engineering isn’t totally lost art it seems.

The inside is a more interesting place to be. Fake leather seats with wavy pattern stitching await your back and ass, while suede trimmed door cards and an upper dash meet your eyes and hands. The EBRO s800/Cherry Tiggo 8 may have many faults but an interesting modern interior isn’t really one of them. It’s cheap feeling and a damn television sized screen is just stuck onto the center of the dashboard like every other modern car. But at the same time, Chery just threw the entire interior materials pallet at the car.

The top do the dash is suede, then plastic that looks like metal, then there’s an LED strip that wraps around the entire car, then fake wood, then fake leather, and finally hard plastic. The door cards are the same, with the added bonus of incredibly thin metal speaker covers. Not a single designer put their hand down to just stop in adding textures and materials in here. It tricks you into thinking that you’re in something nicer. That façade fades away the moment you start touching some of the really crappy plastics in there. Or drive the damn thing.

The front four seats are all heated, with separate controls for the 2nd row. However the heated seat buttons back there are not physical buttons, and your knees or bags will accidentally activate them with a slight touch.

The front two seats, meanwhile, are ventilated! This works ok. Finally, only the front passenger gets to have a massaging seat. Because fuck the driver, that plebeian. Running the massage for too long will make the cabin smell like hot ABS plastic in a dirty 3D printer. There are 5 options, and my preference is “Relieve”, followed by “Catwalk”. You can run the seat ventilation while getting a massage but pretty soon it just starts blowing hot air around.

There is ample room for both occupants and storage isn’t an issue either. The seats fold flush with the high trunk floor, and even with all 3 rows up and 7 adults seated, you can pile a lot of crap in here. If you don’t have people in the third row, the second row seats also have the ability to recline. Additionally, the poor fucks in the third row lack air conditioning, unlike the Hyundai Santa Fe (which is also AWD, not obtuse to use, handles better… etc etc).

One must Master Statics Before Dynamics

Structurally the car feels sound. It doesn’t feel like a dressed up tin can and crap isn’t rattling over bumps. This doesn’t feel like a Ford Edge or an oversized Hyundai i10 from 2008. This is good!

However, the EBRO s800 PHEV drives like shit. This is not so good.

The controls are numb. Brakes, throttle, steering; it’s a spectrum of feedback ranging from a guess of reality to a game of cost cutting that ended with a used 10 year old sim rig as a benchmark. I get the feeling that the arcade game “Ferrari F355 Challenge” does a better job at telling me how a car drives.

The Hybrid s800 is purely FWD. It has a 1.5L turbo i4 paired to an “eCVT” and a single electric motor. Somewhere within this mess exists 279 hp. Sure. Maybe it has that. That 8.5s 0-60 starts with an electric low end punch before forgetting it’s supposed to go anywhere. How heavy is this thing?

2000 kg. Lovely.

The throttle pedal has the response of a stoned snail. Even better is starting from a stop because the throttle does jack shit. Many modern automatic cars have an “auto hold” function that keeps the car stationary when stopped but still in drive. I couldn’t figure out how to disable it. So I left it on.

The EBRO takes the Vinfast approach to this type of tech. By whereas the Vinfast VF8 will do whatever it takes to creep at 5mph, the EBRO s800 simply ignores your inputs! Oh yes! Exactly what I want from a fucking car! So while trying to pull away from a traffic light, giving it a light to medium throttle application did jack shit. It wasn’t until I was a good 1/3 the way through the pedal’s travel that I hit some threshold and the car took off, front wheels spinning and chirping as traction control had an aneurysm. How nice.

During my brief time with the car, it was also noted that the throttle has some slightly erratic behavior under constant application. The throttle acted up the most when the big brother driver monitoring camera behind the steering wheel was briefly “conveniently blocked with an IMSA hat”. For science of course. In fact, during this camera blocking ordeal, the entire car seemed to have a nervous breakdown.

Finally, the suspension is, unsurprisingly, a mess. The front and rear are seemingly out of phase with each other, with bumps revealing a different behavior front to rear. Additionally, the rear end settles after the front, and it takes a little more time to do so. When on a bumpy road or moving through a city with multiple speed bumps, the still unsettled rear will just keep undulating until the roughness has stopped. This will not make you nauseous at all.

The car also has a toggle-able “Anti-dive” function for when you brake. Yes really. But I didn’t notice it doing much. It probably lives in the head of whoever coded it.

The UI From Hell

The screen of obtuseness is jam packed with highly innovative driver experience enhancing road vehicle technology that uses a holistic approach to seamlessly integrate all necessary user function.

In other words, the center screen of disappointment is your go to place for nearly every god damn function in this car. Except for volume control, that can only be changed on the steering wheel. Gotta give the driver something to make up for not getting their back rubbed…

Whoever set up the software for this abomination must have never driven a car in their life. Touch screen reliance is already a pain in the ass, but this thing takes it a step further by being a laggy, priority-less mess. It’ll sometimes take several firm presses for the screen to recognize that I’m asking it for a menu. Other times it doesn’t do it at all.

The whole car from driving to infotainment is constantly panicking and forgetting what it needs to do. It just sits there when you ask it for the air conditioning menu or to just move forward, staring blankly back at you. It’s mentally checked out for a bit, please be patient. Maybe it thinks it’s a mailbox?

The screen has the usual mix of many menus and text and settings, but its size does help. Not that navigating that virtual disaster while driving is easy, it’s still a pain in the ass, but at least your passenger won’t have to squint.

The system also lacks priorities. The Polestar 2 we reviewed earlier also has AC controls in the center screen. However the main functions (seat heaters, temperature, strength) are always present at the bottom of the screen no matter what you do. The s800/Tiggo 8 looks at this idea and wipes in ass with it. If CarPlay is used or you’re looking through menus, the tiny ac controls at the bottom of the screen go away. The car then requests of you to then swipe up from the bottom of the screen with your sweaty ass fingers before showing you these controls and the button for the “Home Screen”.

“So what?”, you might ask, “just set it and forget it”. Allow me to give you the typical EBRO s800 experience:

While driving, you go to rest you arm on the center arm rest, or maybe you’re going to check the nav, whatever. In doing so, you lightly brush up against the auto AC Haptic Touch button that’s placed by your elbow for your convenience:

Suddenly, the aircon is blasting at its max from every vent in the car. Annoyed, you touch that button to shut it off. But the car doesn’t remember your prior settings, so you’ve gotta now swipe up, press the ac button several times, and then reset your AC settings. This is a Spanish market car driven in Ibiza, so you’ve likely just blown through three roundabouts and killed two mopeds during that ordeal.

What more? That dial that selects driver modes will hijack the screen to show you some preset image of the car while a voice also informs you what mode you’re in. This lasts for several seconds. Oh were you using that GPS? Sorry WE IN SPORT MODE BITCH! ALERT THE PRESIDENT!

PLEASE GET ME OUT OF THIS SHITBOX

THIS FUCKING CAR IS DRIVING ME INSANE. So many things about it feel half assed or incomplete. I do not care that you can set the LED light strips in this car to pulse and change colors to the beat of music when the car doesn’t move when I give it gas. Or demands to be at a complete stop with the brakes pressed to engage drive or reverse, only to ignore my actions anyways. THE CAR HAS AUTO HOLD ON 24/7, WHY DO I NEED TO USE THE BRAKE?

And the untested jank just keeps piling up. Driving is already a chore, and trying to park this thing in a garage makes me wish I had a Docking Pilot here to help guide me. The throttle does the same bullshit as always, making the dance between gas and brake being more like a harshly jolting on-off switch. There is a whole suit of cameras and augmented reality views to help maneuver this boat. But the moment you engage drive they usually all go away. So it’s back into the laggy screen to find the menu and app that shows camera views and proximity warnings. Sometimes it doesn’t do this, but 98% of the time it does.

While all that crap shuts off and leaves you when you need it most, the car pops up this three-quarter augmented reality view of the inside of whatever turn you’re making so you don’t plow into… something rather. I think this is supposed to help with blind spots? Thank you for covering up my GPS, I hope everyone involved with this car gets hemorrhoids.

The speed limit reading system is also completely useless. It’ll read the signs correctly maybe 10% of the time. The other 90% is a constant barrage of noises and warnings as the car freaks out think you’re in a 20 kph zone when you’re actually on a rural highway where it’s 80. No you can’t turn it off, only shut it up briefly.

The door handles are also just Aston Martin knockoffs. They’re flush with the door but aren’t electrically activated. I mean, the car will pop them out when you unlock the car, but you can also open them if when flush. They feel like you could rip them out if you tried with medium effort. I hate them.

You can make a car full of tech, but fucking hell please beta test this shit first. Over the course of a week, that Polestar 2 I mentioned earlier misread the speed limit maybe twice. You could shut off all these extraneous features if you wanted to, but also they just worked. Annoying maybe but they’re annoying for existing and functioning as intended (you know, the principle of it) and not because they didn’t fucking work.

God I hope some idiot steals this thing…

Kickstart My Heart – A Tale of Folly and Fortune

Walking down to our noblest of steeds on morning, we found the s800 with its door handles open and a gear selector that was… well…

Some moron tried to steal a fucking EBRO s800 PHEV. And now the 12v system is dead. For fucks sake dude there’s a Defender and RSQ7 in front of it but sure go for the rebodied Chery Tiggo 8. I’m sure the €37.000 is worth it on the used market.

Now comes the fun bit, where the hell is the 12v battery in this abomination? Well let’s check under the hood!

Uh huh. Ok so let’s just remove those covers aaaannnddd

What a beast of design. Welp guess we gotta go through the trunk- it doesn’t open because of the battery. Ok so drop all the rear seats and crawl in back there. Shirt off too because this things been baking in the Spanish sun. Pull off the plastic cover and… I need a screw driver to engage the emergency release. Otherwise, it just bends under my finger. I guess people who drive the s800/Tiggo 8 just don’t use their car for kidnappings. Maybe they have to sign a very serious contract.

Well, until it eventually gets brute forced open, let’s remove the covers back here and–

Oh. What lovely mechanisms. I’d like to taste the orange flavored ones please. What’s that? The battery is under a cover in the left rear fender that you can remove once you’ve dug through all the trunk crap? Shoudla known!

And while we’re in here, please admire that sound deadening! Anyways, hook that shit up to a diesel Peugeot van and fire awa– the car never turned on. The most it did was fire up the screen with every warning light illuminated. We put it neutral with the nub of a column shifter and watched as a tow truck took it away.

Transportation for the rest of that trip was done using a 9-person Fiat van, which was a better vehicle in every way.

To Finish Up

I’m sure there are some pretty good home grown Chinese cars out there. This is not one of them. I want to try something from BYD someday. And the desire to get my hands on a Hongqi HS9 is an unhealthy obsession. This thing however is an unfinished, underdeveloped abomination. It needs another year or so to finish baking. Maybe some of these are software issues that could be fixed using over the air updates. But you can’t code your way around an underdamped system. And for the issues you can fix remotely… let’s be real. We really shouldn’t be doing this. The product should be good to go from the factory with minor faults and improvements getting fixed with time.

While I appreciated the massaging seats, the Vinfast VF8 felt more like a car and less like a dangerous rolling embarrassment, which is a statement I never thought I’d be making.