Chery’s iCAR V23 borrows its shape from old 4x4s, though nobody should mistake it for a ladder-frame truck — it’s a small electric SUV with a square body, and it drives like one. Sales opened in China on 16 December 2024, and because the badge changes the moment the car leaves the country, and because spec gets shuffled market by market, what a buyer ends up with really does depend on where the ship docks.

V23 is iCAR’s rugged-looking line and this sits at the entry end of it, so 4.2 metres nose to tail, five seats, battery and nothing else. Chery hauled one out to Dubai in August 2025 to announce the export brand name, Malaysia had stock by the end of that year, South Africa came along in May 2026, and the right-hand-drive list keeps growing from there.

Exterior

Upright, square, barely any overhang at either end — the proportions do most of the work. Round LED headlights sit inside circular housings with slim bars running off to each side, the bonnet is flat, the bumpers are thick, the arches are wide, and the side steps are fixed rather than folding, so you can put your whole weight on one climbing in. Where the C-pillar glass would normally go there’s a blind panel instead, a trick lifted straight off old off-roaders.

Height against width on the iCAR V23 lands near 0.96, meaning it reads almost as tall as it is wide, and that ratio is the entire reason the thing has presence in a car park.

Round the back, the tailgate swings sideways rather than lifting, and bolted onto it is a “backpack” box worth about 40 litres with the high-mounted brake light set into it. iCAR calls that light Lego-style, and one look tells you why.

Dimensions, since everyone asks those first: 4,220 mm long, 1,915 wide, 1,845 tall on a 2,735 mm wheelbase, with the Cyber trim running a touch longer at 4,249 mm because it gets its own bonnet and bumpers. Rear-drive cars sit on 19-inch wheels with 255/55 rubber, while the all-wheel-drive jumps to 21s on 265/45 — looks better, rides slightly worse.

Six colours, running from Off-Road Orange through Khaki White and Army Green to Slate Silver, Gravel Grey and Carbon Black. The body panels unbolt as well, and mounting points are dotted around for racks and lights and whatever else a customer decides to hang off it, which is honestly half the appeal for the younger buyers this car chases.

Interior

Calmer in here than the shell outside would have you expect. That 15.4-inch Quad HD screen floats above the dash with a digital cluster tucked behind the wheel, Snapdragon 8155 does the processing so nothing lags, wireless CarPlay and Android Auto are standard, and — the bit I’d actually point out to a customer — four fat rotary buttons survive on the console for climate and drive mode. Try working a touchscreen with gloves on and you’ll see why that counts.

Space utilisation gets quoted at 67.73%, which sounds like a marketing number right up until you drop into the second row and clock the headroom. Five seats, 234 litres of boot with the bench up, 744 once the 50/50 rear folds flat, though a few export sheets print 372 and 994 litres because they measure the same space differently. Worth knowing which figure your local brochure runs before a customer finds the mismatch.

Most trims bring ventilated and massaged front seats, faux leather everywhere you’d touch, grab handles for all five occupants, and a seven-speaker system that’s fine without being anything special. The NFC card reader lives out on the driver’s-side fender, so unlocking doesn’t involve digging around for a key.

Two screen features are worth demonstrating rather than describing: the 540-degree camera with its transparent-chassis view, and the off-road page that reads out pitch and roll angles. Drive recorder comes built in.

Powertrain and Chassis

Battery and nothing else — the iCAR V23 has no engine, no generator, nothing to fill up.

Export cars arrive two ways. Rear-drive means a single motor on the back axle rated 100 kW, or 136 PS, plus 180 Nm, working off a 59.9 kWh LFP pack good for 401 km on CLTC; call that 360 km on NEDC or roughly 312 on WLTP, and 11 seconds to 100 km/h, which is leisurely and honestly fine for what this is.

Step up to the all-wheel-drive car, badged iWD in a few markets, and a front motor joins in for 155 kW (211 PS) and 292 Nm combined, with an 81.8 kWh NMC pack behind it. That works out at 501 km CLTC, 430 on NEDC, somewhere close to 400 on WLTP, and 7.5 seconds to 100. Both versions stop pulling at 140 km/h.

AC charging sits at 6.6 kW across the range, DC peaks at 85 kW on rear-drive and 104 kW once you go all-wheel-drive, and either way 30 to 80% eats a bit over half an hour, so it’s better to plan a trail day around that than fight it. There’s 3.3 kW of vehicle-to-load too, and that’s the feature campers genuinely use rather than just read about.

Underneath there are MacPherson struts up front and a five-link independent rear, which is unusual at this size and shows up in how flat the car stays through a corner for something standing this tall. Ventilated discs at the front, solid at the back. Ground clearance reads 205 mm on rear-drive against 210 with all-wheel drive, the approach angle is 42 degrees to 41 at the departure end, wading depth runs to 600 mm, and it’ll haul itself up a 40% grade. Hill descent and hill hold both come standard.

Rear-drive cars carry five drive modes — Eco, Comfort, Sport, Individual, Slippery — and all-wheel drive tacks on Off-Road. No low range and no locking differentials though, so pitch it as a capable trail car and stop short of calling it a rock crawler, because that conversation goes badly later on.

The body is a cage with better than 70% high-strength steel and the pack runs liquid cooling. Six airbags. Level 2 assistance handles AEB, adaptive cruise, blind-spot, lane keeping and the rest of the alphabet.

One more thing worth keeping straight: China switched to a 2026 “Super V23” back in September 2025, and that car moved to a 185 kW rear motor, an 80.16 kWh LFP pack, 550 km CLTC and 160 kW charging, with a V23S flagship pushing 335 kW (455 PS) and 490 Nm for 4.5 seconds to 100. When each export market inherits that update is a separate question, and one we check per destination.

FAQ

Is the iCAR V23 a pure electric car or a range extender? Pure electric — a BEV, so one battery, motors on the axles, nothing burning fuel anywhere. The confusion is fair enough, because the bigger V27 in the same family is the REEV and the two get mixed up constantly. If your customer wants a range extender, point them at the V27 rather than this one.

How far does it go, and how long does charging take? CLTC gives 401 km for rear-drive and 501 for all-wheel-drive, but WLTP pulls those down to somewhere near 312 and 400, and WLTP is the figure to quote wherever that’s the local test. Charging comes in at 85 kW or 104 kW on DC depending which drivetrain you take, about half an hour for 30 to 80%, and 6.6 kW on AC.

Why is it called iCAUR V23 outside China? Same car, different lettering on the tailgate. Chery sells it as iCAR domestically and as iCAUR everywhere else, purely because the shorter name hit a trademark clash abroad. Body, specs and part numbers all carry over untouched, and only the badge and the local spec sheet change.

Can the iCAR V23 be imported to my country? Where a market has no import certification rule, it goes straight in. Some regions do ask for type approval and the EU is the one that comes up most, so in those cases we have to confirm first whether the model can be supplied with the certification your country wants. Send the destination over and we’ll check it properly.

How do you supply the V23, and how do we start? We’re a China-based auto export company, so we source the V23 from the manufacturer and handle everything on the export side — paperwork, booking, sea freight, delivery into your port. Most people we deal with are overseas dealers and importers putting together a steady line out of China, though we also help individual buyers running their own import. Send over your market, drive side and rough volume, and we’ll come back with availability, shipping options and the document list your destination actually needs.

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