Citroen is Gone, But Chery May Still Feel its Wrath

The ghost of Australia’s longest-running car brand could be about to haunt one of the newest.

Chinese carmaker Chery recently announced it was changing the name of the Omoda 5, with the updated small SUV to now be known as the Chery C5.

However, the C5 was the name given to Citroen’s large family car – a model first launched in Australia in 2001, and was sold as an alternative to the German brands for a decade and a half.

After a hiatus of several years, Citroen launched the C5 Aircross – a small SUV – in 2019, before adding the C5 X wagon in 2022. Both of which remained on sale until the French brand exited the Australian market in late 2024, marking 101 years of continuous operations for Citroen locally.

But despite Citroen no longer being in the Australian market, parent company Stellantis – which owns 14 car brands, including Peugeot, Fiat, and Alfa Romeo – still holds the trademark for the Citroen C5 name locally.

CarSauce was unable to find any trademark applications related to the C5 name from Chery Automobile.

“Citroen owns and uses the name C5 for years,” a spokesperson for Stellantis told CarSauce.

“We recently launched the second generation of our SUV, the all-new C5 Aircross (overseas). At this stage, we do not provide any information about future actions we will conduct to protect our brand and product names.”

According to the filing on IP Australia – the Federal Government’s trademark database – the Citroen C5 name is not due to expire until 2030, at which point Citroen (and its parent company) will have owned the trademark for 30 years.

While any decision regarding ownership of the C5 name comes down to the discretion of the registrar at IP Australia, typically a badge with decades of use would need to have been discarded for a period of five years before another company can begin using it.

Even with Citroen no longer trading in Australia, the fact that there are C5 models still available in global markets could work against Chery.

It’s a potentially embarrassing situation for Chery, given nobody at the company seemingly checked to see if the C5 name was available – or apparently even remembered the Citroen existed.

If Stellantis does choose to block Chery from using the C5 name in Australia – after Chery has just completed the renaming process – it could be costly for the Chinese carmaker, given the need to physically rebadge the car and produce all-new marketing materials.

CarSauce has approached Chery for comment, and this article will be updated with any response.