Chery Eastar: not a car to shop for in Bahrain in 2026
2/5MotorsSouq Editorial Team
We are not publishing a spec sheet for the Eastar because we cannot honestly source GCC-accurate figures for a car this old and this thoroughly discontinued — engine and transmission options varied by market and by year across its production run, and no current distributor stocks documentation for it. If you come across one for sale in Bahrain, treat it purely as a very cheap, high-risk runabout: buy it only at scrap-adjacent money, inspect it as you would any 15-plus-year-old unsupported import, and do not expect to find parts, service history or resale value. There is no scenario where this is a car worth paying a premium for.
Pros
- If found very cheap, offers basic transportation at scrap-adjacent cost
- Simple period mechanicals that a generalist workshop can still work on
Cons
- No factory or distributor support of any kind in Bahrain today
- No reliable GCC-specific spec data exists to verify what you're buying
- Parts sourcing for anything non-generic is a genuine problem, not a minor inconvenience
- Essentially zero resale value beyond scrap or export
Chery built the Eastar as a mid-size family sedan roughly between 2006 and 2011, sold in some markets under names like Cowin 5 or Speranza A620. It predates every part of the Chery product line sold in Bahrain today — the Arrizo and Tiggo ranges are a full generation and a half of engineering removed from it, and comparing them tells you almost nothing useful about the Eastar itself.
We looked hard for confident, GCC-specific engine and transmission figures to publish here and could not clear our own bar for accuracy: sources disagree on displacement, output and gearbox pairing depending on market and model year, which is exactly the situation our editorial rule against inventing numbers exists for. Rather than publish a guess dressed as a spec sheet, we're publishing this review only.
Why this matters if you're actually looking at one
If an Eastar shows up in a Bahraini classifieds listing today, it is a car pushing two decades old, sold new here (if at all) through a distributor network that no longer exists in its original form. Chery's current Bahrain distributor, Motorcity, has no obligation to stock parts, documentation or service knowledge for a nameplate it never imported under its current agreement, and generally doesn't.
That leaves a buyer with three real risks: sourcing any part beyond the most generic consumable, verifying the car's actual mechanical condition without a service history anyone can authenticate, and accepting that resale, if you ever want to sell, will be to another buyer treating the car exactly the same way you did — as a disposable, cheap-as-possible runabout, not an investment or even a car to maintain long-term.