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A brown Indonesian dhole and her black Chinese tiger
Two Cars Weren't Enough: How the Government Made Me Buy a Third
by Berlian
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Part One: The Announcement That Ruined My January
I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. Early January 2026, sitting in the crew briefing room at Terminal 3 Soekarno-Hatta, stirring terrible vending machine coffee and half-listening to one of the senior captains talk about the new ATC frequency changes over the Java corridor. My phone buzzed with a Jakarta news notification, and I figured it was something boring — another flood warning, another road closure, something I could scroll past. Instead, I read the headline twice, then a third time, just to make sure I wasn't misreading it through sleep-deprived eyes after a 4 AM check-in.
Governor Announces Odd-Even Extension to Electric Vehicles Starting 4 January 2027.
I put my phone face-down on the table, took a very long sip of my terrible coffee, and stared at the ceiling.
Captain Hendra, who was sitting across from me, noticed my expression. "Bad news?"
"The government," I said, "has decided to ruin my life again."
He laughed. He didn't know I was serious.
See, here's the thing. When the original odd-even rule for non-electric private cars expanded to all of Jakarta back in early 2026, I had technically already solved the problem. I had two cars: my yellow 2023 Toyota Agya GR Sport with plate B 3 RLN, and my yellow 2025 VinFast VF 3 with plate B 2903 THD. Both odd. But the VF 3 was electric, and at the time, EVs were exempt. So I'd worked out this tidy little system — drive the VF 3 whenever I felt like it, drive the Agya when I needed more range for a longer trip, and technically never be blocked by the odd-even rule because at least one of my cars was always legal to drive.
Neat, right? Government-proof, almost.
Well. Almost.
B 2903 THD — odd. B 3 RLN — odd. Both of them, odd. I'd never thought much about it because the VF 3's exemption made it irrelevant. But now, starting January 2027, EVs would lose that exemption. Both my cars would be restricted on even-numbered dates. The same dates. Simultaneously.
I could already picture it: January 4th, 2027. An even-numbered date. I've got a morning flight. I wake up at 4 AM, go down to my apartment's parking garage, and look at two cars I legally cannot drive to work. My options would be grabbing a taxi, taking the airport bus from the Kalideres stop, or just never sleeping again so I could leave before the restricted hours began.
None of those are acceptable. I'm a pilot. I have a very specific relationship with schedules and reliability. I cannot afford to miss a briefing because my Transjakarta bus decided to take a scenic route through Tangerang.
I went home after that shift and sat on my couch for a long time, thinking.
Then I started doing math.
---
Part Two: The Logic of a Third Car (Yes, Really)
I want to be clear: buying a third car was not something I ever planned to do in my life. I grew up in Ciguguk, near Cimahi in West Java, in a family where my father grew rice and my mother made every rupiah stretch until it screamed. The idea of owning three cars would have seemed like a fever dream to the version of me who shared a boarding house bathroom with five other university students in Bandung. And yet, here I was, a 30-year-old first officer at Trans Indonesia Airlines, sitting on my couch in Kalideres with a spreadsheet open on my laptop, calculating whether I could afford a third vehicle.
The government had, as I suspected, designed this whole situation specifically to make people buy cars. I have no evidence of this. I also have no evidence it's not true.
Okay, so: what kind of third car did I actually need?
The VF 3 was my city car. Good for the commute, great for Jakarta chaos, cheap to run, fun to drive, fits in tiny parking spots. I love it, quirks and all. But it has real limitations — the range anxiety on longer trips, the firm suspension, the sad air conditioning. It's not going anywhere. I wasn't selling it.
The Agya was my road trip backup. Good range, comfortable enough, reliable as a Swiss watch. The problem was the plate — B 3 RLN, odd. If I kept both the VF 3 and the Agya, I'd still be stuck on even dates after January 2027.
So I needed something new. Something with an even plate. That much was clear.
But I'd also been living with the VF 3 for about a year now, and I'd grown accustomed to the driving experience — instant torque, smooth acceleration, low running costs. Going back to a full petrol car felt like a step backward. Especially with what was happening in the Middle East. Fuel prices in Indonesia had been creeping up steadily through 2025 and into 2026, with the regional conflict keeping oil markets nervous. The days of cheap petrol felt numbered.
At the same time, a pure EV wasn't the right answer either. The VF 3 had taught me that much. For city commutes? Perfect. For driving 175 kilometers to West Java to visit my parents? A test of endurance and patience. I'd done that trip in the VF 3 once and spent the entire return journey watching the battery percentage with the same focused anxiety I reserve for monitoring fuel on a low-fuel flight. I didn't need more of that in my life.
The answer presented itself gradually, the way most obvious answers do: a plug-in hybrid.
Charge it at home, run on electricity for the daily Kalideres-to-Soekarno-Hatta commute — around 25 to 30 kilometers each way. Then, for the longer trips, the petrol engine handles it. Best of both worlds. Lower running costs than a pure petrol car, none of the range anxiety of a pure EV. In theory, it was perfect.
And while I was at it — I wanted something bigger.
I know. I know how that sounds. I'm a small-car person. Always have been. The Agya, the VF 3 — I've always gravitated toward compact, nimble, city-friendly cars. But after spending time in the VF 3's tight cabin and constantly dealing with the firm-suspension beating on Jakarta's broken roads, something in me wanted space. Real space. A car where I could sit with my flight bag, camera gear, and a proper amount of legroom without feeling like I was folding myself into a suitcase. The VF 3 was great, but it was honest about being a budget city car. I wanted something that felt like it respected my time on this earth.
An SUV PHEV. Under 500 million rupiah OTR, which was the absolute ceiling I could manage on a five-year loan after accounting for the VF 3's remaining installments and battery subscription, the Agya's last two years of payments, and the various other financial commitments I'd accumulated. (Yes, I was still paying for the Agya. The timing was terrible.)
Budget set. Category set. Now I had to figure out the details.
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Part Three: Selling the Agya, and Hating Every Part of It
This was harder than I expected.
Logically, I knew I had to sell the Agya. Two reasons: I couldn't afford to keep paying for a car I could no longer use effectively once the 2027 rule kicked in, and clearing the remaining installments would free up financial breathing room for the new car's monthly payments.
Emotionally? That little yellow car and I had been through a lot together. Two and a half years and 35,000 kilometers. Airport runs at 4 AM. The trip to Ciguguk and back. Rainy season drives where the Jakarta flood maps might as well have been abstract art. The Agya had never let me down, not once.
And then there was the plate.
B 3 RLN.
I'd been so pleased with myself when I got that. My name is Berlian. B 3 RLN. It wasn't exact, but it was close enough that every time I parked the car, I smiled a little. A tiny, private vanity project. And now I had to give it up because the provincial government decided that exempting EVs from the odd-even rule was getting too complicated.
I'm not bitter. (I'm extremely bitter.)
The process of settling the installments and preparing for sale took most of February and March 2026. I spent probably too many hours on OLX and CarHub Indonesia, researching what used Agyas were fetching. The GR Sport variant held its value better than the standard LCGC version — some benefit to paying the premium for the non-LCGC badge, I suppose. I eventually sold it to a young guy from Cibubur who drove out to Kalideres with his father to inspect it. He was maybe 22, first car, couldn't stop grinning when he sat in the driver's seat. The GR Sport badges, the sport seats, the red stitching — he loved all of it. He didn't care about the "e-taxi car" reputation at all. Just like I hadn't, years ago.
I handed over the key and stood in the parking garage watching them drive it away. The plate said B 3 RLN one last time, then disappeared around the corner of the access ramp.
"Government conspiracy," I muttered to nobody, then went back upstairs to look at PHEV listings.
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Part Four: Two Candidates, One Winner
The market for affordable PHEVs in Indonesia in early 2026 was, to put it diplomatically, limited. The truly good options — Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, Toyota RAV4 PHEV, the Korean options — all sat well above my 500 million budget. Twice my budget, to be precise — thanks, import taxes. I scrolled through listings feeling increasingly frustrated until I landed on the two that actually fit:
Chery Tiggo 8 CSH Comfort — Rp 450 million
Wuling Darion PHEV CE — Rp 450 million
Both at exactly the same price. Both launched in Indonesia within a few months of each other. Both PHEV systems promising reasonable EV range for city driving. Both are locally assembled so no import taxes. On paper, they were almost eerily competitive.
I spent three weeks researching before I even contacted a dealership. I read every review I could find in Indonesian and English. I watched YouTube videos. I interrogated TIA colleagues who'd test-driven similar cars. I joined a couple of Indonesian car forums under a pseudonym just to read owner discussions. (Not something I'm proud of. Aviation people, we do our homework.)
Here's what I found about the Darion: solid PHEV credentials, better pure-EV range than the Tiggo, comfortable enough interior. The reviews were generally positive about the driving experience.
But.
It's a minivan.
I want to be very clear about how I feel about this. I have nothing against minivans as a category of vehicle. They are practical, efficient, good for families. Many sensible people drive minivans. Those people are different from me. I have spent my entire adult life deliberately not being perceived as soft or delicate or domestic. I grew up as the only daughter in a family of four brothers, playing football in the rice paddies, climbing the tallest trees in Ciguguk to watch planes from above, and later fighting for a spot in a profession where people still sometimes do double-takes when I walk through the crew door. I wear my tomboyish nature like a badge.
I was not going to drive a minivan.
Some of my colleagues at TIA found this very funny when I explained it. Captain Hendra, who drives a sensible Toyota Kijang Innova, laughed for about a minute and a half. "You're choosing a car based on vibes?" he said.
"I'm choosing a car based on identity," I said. "There's a difference."
He laughed harder. I ignored him.
The Tiggo 8 CSH, on the other hand, was an SUV. A proper, upright, wide-shouldered, commanding SUV. When I looked at pictures of it online, something in me relaxed. That was a car that looked like it meant business. A big, assertive front grille with the illuminated Chery logo. Full LED headlights with that tiger-eye design. The tall, solid stance on 19-inch alloy wheels with 235/50 R19 rubber. This was a car that said, very clearly: I am not messing around.
Coming from the small, low, slightly toy-like VF 3, the idea of sitting up high in something like the Tiggo 8 felt genuinely appealing. Not in a compensation kind of way — in a practical, confidence kind of way. Bigger car, better sightlines in Jakarta's chaotic traffic. More presence on the road. People pay attention to SUVs in a way they don't pay attention to tiny hatchbacks.
I booked test drives at both dealerships on the same weekend.
The Darion test drive confirmed my aesthetic opinion. Nothing wrong with how it drove. But sitting in it, I kept thinking about school pickup runs and family road trips, neither of which I was interested in. I thanked the salesperson, took their brochure, and left.
The Tiggo 8 CSH dealership was a different experience entirely.
The moment I saw the Comfort trim in Black sitting in the showroom, something clicked. The illuminated logo grille caught the overhead lights. The roofline was tall and purposeful. Hidden door handles — a small detail I hadn't fully registered in photos, but seeing them in person, I understood immediately. It looked clean. Modern. Almost aggressively understated in a way that somehow felt premium rather than plain.
My test drive salesperson was a chevrotain woman named Dian, maybe a few years younger than me, who didn't flinch when I started asking technical questions about the powertrain. She knew her stuff. We talked about the 1.5-litre dedicated hybrid engine, the DHT transmission, the drive motor and how the SUPER HEV + EV system balanced between electric and petrol. She walked me through the battery specs, the 90-plus kilometers of pure EV range, the comprehensive range of over 1,300 kilometers on a full tank and full battery. She showed me the specs sheet: 215 kilowatts of combined system output, 310 Newton-meters of torque from the drive motor, the eight-second 0 to 100 time.
That last number caught my attention. Eight seconds to a hundred, in an SUV that weighs and carries what it weighs and carries. The electric motor handles the initial punch. You feel it immediately off the line — no hesitation, no waiting for a combustion engine to build revs.
I've flown aircraft with a rotation speed of 150 knots. I'm not easily impressed by car acceleration. But that departure from standstill in the Tiggo 8 — the way the electric torque just shoved the car forward before I'd even fully committed to pressing the accelerator — that got my attention.
I drove it out onto the test route, which ran along some of the wider roads near the dealership and included a section of decent city traffic. The car steered with surprising confidence given its size. The wheelbase is 2,710 millimeters and the overall length is 4,725 millimeters — this is not a small car. But the steering felt direct, and the view from the driver's seat, sitting high over most of the traffic, was immediately reassuring. I could see everything. The seven-seater cabin behind me felt like a comfortable living room.
The infotainment system — a massive 15.6-inch capacitive touchscreen in the center console — was responsive. Not the slightest hint of the three-second lag I'd grown to despise in the VF 3's system. The Snapdragon 8155 chip running behind it was obviously not a budget afterthought. The 10.25-inch LCD cluster in front of the driver was clear and readable in the afternoon sunlight.
The AR HUD system projected navigation directions and speed information onto the windscreen in a way that was genuinely useful rather than gimmicky. As someone who spends her working hours with flight instruments arrayed across a cockpit panel, I appreciate well-designed information displays. This was well-designed.
I tested the seats. The Comfort trim driver's seat had six-way electric adjustment, and I found my preferred position quickly — I like sitting slightly lower than most Indonesian drivers, closer to how I sit in an aircraft seat, with the steering wheel tilted just so. The front passenger had a four-way electric seat. And the second row — I slid back there during a brief stop just to check — had enough space that even at my 175 centimeters, I wasn't pressed against the front seat. The third row had space, too, though I'd likely use it for cargo more than passengers.
By the time we got back to the dealership, I'd already made up my mind.
The Darion had better pure-EV range on paper. That was real, and I acknowledged it. But the Tiggo 8 CSH Comfort offered me something the Darion couldn't: the feeling that I was in the right vehicle for who I am. And Chery's warranty package was genuinely impressive. Six-year vehicle warranty. Ten-year engine warranty. Eight-year powertrain battery warranty. Four years of free maintenance. Three years of free roadside assistance. For a Chinese brand trying to establish trust in the Indonesian market, Chery clearly understood that the warranty was part of the value proposition.
The Tiggo 8 wasn't a brand-new model — Chery had been selling it in Indonesia long enough that early owners had racked up real-world kilometers and real-world experiences. Reviews from owners were generally positive. The CSH specifically had been refined through feedback. That gave me more confidence than I would have had with a brand-new product launch.
I came back to see Dian the next day and told her I wanted the Comfort trim, in Black.
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Part Five: Waiting, and Being Impatient About It
I placed the order in April 2026. Delivery was estimated for June. Two months of waiting.
I know how to be patient. It's a professional requirement. I have sat in holding patterns for 45 minutes waiting for a slot to land at Soekarno-Hatta. I have pre-flighted aircraft in the pouring rain without rushing. But waiting for a car I've already paid a deposit on is a uniquely annoying kind of impatience.
I kept finding excuses to drive past the dealership. I told myself it was on my way to things. It wasn't, really.
During that waiting period, I also dealt with the practical question of the plate. I was very specific with the dealership: I needed an even-numbered plate. After the B 3 RLN situation, I was taking no chances. Dian understood — a lot of customers had been making similar requests since the odd-even announcement.
The plate I received was B 2276 SJD.
B-2-2-7-6. The 2s made me happy. Even, definitively, unambiguously even. I stared at the plate number for a while when Dian sent me the preview. A small relief, but a real one.
The call came in early June: my Tiggo 8 was ready for collection.
I drove the VF 3 to the dealership. A colleague from TIA, a first officer named Fariz who'd been listening to me talk about this purchase for months, came along because I'd threatened to make him come along if I had to hear him say "SUV drivers are insecure" one more time. He'd made that comment in the crew room and refused to retract it until he saw the actual car. Once he did, he went quiet for a moment, then said, "Okay, that is a good-looking car."
I handed over the VF 3 keys to Dian for safekeeping while we did the handover paperwork. Fariz took about forty photographs of the Black Tiggo 8 in the delivery bay, which I will pretend was entirely his idea.
The drive home from the dealership, heading east on Jalan Daan Mogot, back toward Kalideres, was the kind of drive that reminds you why cars are more than just transportation. Jakarta was hot and humid, the traffic was predictably chaotic, motorcycles wove between lanes with their usual creative disregard for lane markings. But I was sitting in something new, something big and quiet and composed, and the city looked different from up here.
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Part Six: The First Few Months
August 2026. About two months into ownership. Here's what I know.
The car is genuinely quieter than anything I've owned. In EV mode, which is where I spend most of my time commuting to and from Soekarno-Hatta, the cabin is almost eerily still. Just the whisper of tires on pavement and the distant rumble of Jakarta outside the glass. The PM2.5/N95 air filter means the interior air quality is noticeably better than outside — relevant in Jakarta, where the air quality index is a source of ongoing national embarrassment. The front silent glass helps too. I've started to notice, coming from the VF 3 with its wind noise at highway speeds and the Agya with its regular city-car din, just how much acoustic engineering Chery put into this car's cabin.
The EV range comfortably covers my commute. Kalideres to Soekarno-Hatta Terminal 3 is about 12 kilometers by my usual route via Jalan Raya Kalideres, then onto the Sedyatmo toll road. Round trip, maybe 25 to 30 kilometers depending on whether I need to stop anywhere on the way home. The Tiggo 8 CSH Comfort's pure EV range is quoted at 90-plus kilometers. In practice, with air conditioning on and the usual Jakarta stop-and-go, I'm getting somewhere in the mid-80s. More than enough for my daily use. I typically plug in overnight when I'm home, and I arrive at the airport on days I use the Tiggo 8 with a battery well above 50 percent.
The charging at my apartment complex costs 3,000 rupiah per kilowatt-hour — the same rate I've been paying for the VF 3. A full charge on the Tiggo 8's 18.3 kilowatt-hour battery costs around 55,000 rupiah. For a week of daily commuting, the electricity cost is negligible. The hybrid system's efficiency in HEV mode, when the battery has been discharged and the petrol engine kicks in, is rated at over 19 kilometers per liter. That's genuinely impressive for an SUV this size. My fuel costs for the occasional longer drive have been significantly lower than I expected.
The driving experience deserves its own section.
That eight-second 0-to-100 figure is honest. When you press the accelerator with intent, the electric motor delivers before your conscious mind has fully finished forming the thought. The response is immediate and linear in a way that combustion engines simply aren't. Coming from the VF 3, where I'd grown used to electric delivery, the Tiggo 8 doesn't feel like a step down — it feels like the same principle but with considerably more force behind it. The 310 Newton-meters of drive motor torque is most apparent in the mid-range, when you're on the toll road and need to close a gap quickly or execute an overtake. The car surges forward without drama, without downshifting, without any of the hesitation you get from a conventional automatic transmission hunting for the right gear.
I never drive above 120 kilometers per hour on the toll road, as a general rule. Flight crew are supposed to be responsible road users, and I'd like to think I am. But I can tell the car is comfortable well above that. It sits planted and composed, no chassis float, no steering nervousness. The independent suspension at both front and rear absorbs Jakarta's road imperfections with noticeably more grace than the VF 3 ever managed. My spine has been sending me fewer complaints.
The seven-seat configuration means there's interior space I've never had in a car before. Third row aside — which I fold flat for the cargo space — the second row is genuinely comfortable for adult passengers. I've taken a couple of fellow pilots to dinner in it, and nobody had to fold themselves into awkward positions. The wide space trunk with the flat surface when you fold everything down has already been useful for transporting camera equipment and, on one memorable occasion, helping a neighbor move a piece of furniture that seemed designed to not fit in any normal car.
Now. About the ADAS.
The Tiggo 8 CSH comes equipped with 14 Advanced Driving Assistance System features. This includes Lane Departure Warning, Lane Keeping Assist, Lane Departure Prevention, Integrated Cruise Assist, Adaptive Cruise Control, Front Collision Warning, Autonomous Emergency Braking, Blind Spot Detection, Door Opening Warning, and several others. In theory, this is an impressive suite of safety technology. In theory.
In practice, every single ADAS feature on the Tiggo 8 CSH is tuned as though the engineer who designed it was deeply terrified of litigation and had also never driven in Indonesia.
The first day I drove on the Sedyatmo toll road with the ADAS fully active, the car beeped at me twenty times in four kilometers. Twenty. I counted. I am not joking. Lane Departure Warning triggered because I drifted slightly left while watching a minibus cut across three lanes in front of me. Front Collision Warning activated because a motorcycle got within what it apparently considered an unacceptable proximity, despite the motorcycle being a completely normal distance away by any real-world Jakarta standard. The system seemed genuinely surprised that other vehicles existed on the road.
I tried lowering the sensitivity. The system still beeped, just with slightly less conviction. I spent a week adjusting various combinations of settings, testing them on my commute, and finding new and creative ways to be beeped at. On the third day, while the Lane Keeping Assist actually nudged the steering against my input because I was changing lanes — while my turn signal was on, I should add — I made my decision.
I went through the settings methodically and disabled every ADAS feature except the Blind Spot Detection. For BSD, I kept the visual warning (the icon lights up in the wing mirror) but turned off the audio and haptic alerts. This is the one ADAS function that has been genuinely, immediately useful in Jakarta's traffic. When a motorcycle is hiding in my blind spot as I'm preparing to change lanes, that amber glow in the mirror is valuable information delivered quietly and without drama.
Everything else: off.
I mentioned this to Fariz when we were in the crew room between flights. He seemed concerned. "You're disabling safety features?"
"I'm disabling features that are making me a worse driver by distracting me constantly," I said. "If I'm responding to false alarms twenty times on a four-kilometer road, my attention is on the beeping, not on the road. That's not safer. That's noisier."
He thought about it. "Fair point," he eventually admitted.
In aviation, we have a concept called automation complacency — when you rely too heavily on automated systems and your own situational awareness degrades as a result. The ADAS features, the way they were tuned in this car for Indonesian traffic conditions, weren't adding to my safety. They were creating workload. Pilots are trained to manage workload, to prioritize information, to turn off systems that are generating more noise than signal. I applied the same principle to my car. Problem solved.
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Part Seven: Ciguguk
August. A long weekend aligned with my rostered days off, which almost never happens — scheduling at TIA seems engineered to ensure pilots never have consecutive free days near public holidays. When it did happen, I had one destination in mind.
I'd taken the VF 3 to Ciguguk once, back in late 2025. That trip had involved two charging stops, a total journey time of about five hours for what should be 175 kilometers, and enough battery anxiety to give me a mild existential crisis somewhere on the Cipularang toll road. I'd driven the Agya there many times — comfortable, easy, relaxed. But now the Agya was gone, and the VF 3 was not the right tool for this job.
The Tiggo 8 CSH Comfort was.
I left Kalideres at 6 AM, which is my preferred departure time for any drive west — early enough to miss the worst of Jakarta's morning congestion, early enough to arrive before the midday heat peaks. The car was on a full charge, 100 percent battery, plus I'd filled the tank the day before. Comprehensive range estimated by the system: over 700 kilometers. I had no battery anxiety. I had no fuel anxiety. I had, for the first time in a long time, a road trip that felt genuinely free.
The Sedyatmo toll road out of the airport direction connects smoothly toward the Jakarta Outer Ring Road, which I took southeast toward the Cipularang entrance. It was a Tuesday, still dark when I left, the toll booths sparse and efficient. By the time the sun came up properly over the eastern hills, I was already past Karawang, cruising at a steady 100 kilometers per hour in the right lane, sipping from a travel mug of coffee I'd prepared the night before.
The car is a different experience on the highway than in the city. In the city, it's about the electric motor, the torque, the agility. On the highway, the petrol engine has taken over much of the load — the battery was well-depleted by this point from the city driving portion — and the car settles into a composed, quiet cruise. The combined system power means maintaining highway speeds takes no effort whatsoever. The adaptive cruise control, which I was using since nobody had told me to beeped at me about it yet on the open highway, held a steady gap to the vehicle ahead. Wind noise at 100 was minimal. Road noise filtered through the substantial body structure. I listened to a podcast through the Android Auto connection — a discussion about sustainable aviation fuel that I'd been meaning to catch up on — and genuinely forgot, for about 45 minutes, that I was navigating any particular road.
The Cipularang toll road climbs through the mountains west of Bandung, and this is where the car revealed another side of itself. The gradient is steep in places — this is the section where underpowered trucks sometimes crawl and occasionally stall in the slow lane. The Tiggo 8 climbed without complaint, the combined hybrid output maintaining speed without the transmission hunting or the engine straining. Passing slower vehicles on the uphill sections required nothing more than a firm press of the accelerator, and the response was immediate.
I know these roads well. I've driven this route in the Agya, which handled the grades fine but felt like it was working. I've taken the high-speed train from Halim to Padalarang, which is faster and easier. I've flown into Husein Sastranegara a handful of times for regional flights. But driving into West Java in your own car, with the mountains visible above the toll road barriers and the temperature dropping a degree or two as you climb — there's something about it that the train can't replicate.
I was in Ciguguk by 9 AM. Three hours, no stops, no anxiety.
My parents' house is in a quiet residential lane off the main road through Ciguguk, about ten minutes from the Cimahi city center. The family home is the same traditional wooden structure I grew up in, though my parents have added a small tiled porch in recent years and my mother has turned a corner of the yard into an impressive herb and vegetable garden. I pulled the Tiggo 8 into the lane and immediately realized that the car was extremely large relative to the narrow road. I had maybe half a meter of clearance on either side. I negotiated this slowly and carefully, inch by inch, and parked at the end of the lane with the car mostly on my family's small concrete yard.
I got out and looked at it. The Black paint was dusty from the toll road, but even under dust, the car looked substantial. The illuminated Chery logo had turned itself off since the engine was stopped, but the full LED headlights caught the morning light in a way that made the car look expensive. Almost too expensive for this quiet lane with its tin-roofed houses and small vegetable plots.
My father came out of the front door before I'd even closed the car door.
Sutoyo is 62 years old now, a retired rice farmer who spends most of his time tending a small kitchen garden and watching the same three television channels with great dedication. He has never expressed much interest in cars specifically, but he has strong opinions about things being built well or badly. He walked slowly around the Tiggo 8, hands clasped behind his back, the way he used to walk around rice plants checking for disease.
"This is yours?" he said.
"Mine," I confirmed.
He bent slightly to look at the hidden door handles — or rather, at where he expected door handles to be, and found smooth body panels instead. Then he found the recessed handle, pressed it, felt the door release. He nodded slowly, the way he nods at things he finds technically interesting.
"Chinese car," he said, not as a criticism, just as an observation.
"Chery," I said. "Yes."
"Heavy?"
"Very."
He nodded again. Patted the roof with one hand. "Solid," he said. That was his highest form of automotive approval.
My mother Tini came out next, drying her hands on a dish towel, and her reaction was more direct: "Wah, besar sekali." Very big. Then she looked at me. "Can you even see out of it properly?"
"The visibility is excellent," I said.
"It's very black," she said. "You'll bake in it."
"That's what the climate control is for."
She looked unconvinced, the way she always looks when modern technology is offered as a substitute for common sense. But she touched the side panel, registered the solid thud it gave back, and said, "Good. Doesn't sound hollow." She knows build quality from years of evaluating everything from furniture to cooking pots. She approved of the panel solidity.
My brothers were more vocal. Raja, the mechanic, wanted to look under the hood immediately. He has an instinctive suspicion of hybrid systems — too many components, too much complexity, too many things to go wrong. I let him examine the engine bay while I tried to explain the DHT transmission in terms that would make sense to someone who normally works on two-stroke motorcycles and aging Japanese sedans.
"Where's the timing belt?" he said.
"It's a dedicated hybrid engine. Different architecture."
He gave me the look he reserves for things he considers unnecessarily complicated.
Teguh and Gagah, my twin brothers finishing their computer science degrees, were more interested in the infotainment system. Teguh immediately started asking about the Snapdragon chip and whether the system was rootable. I told him not to try. He looked at the 15.6-inch touchscreen with the expression of someone already planning something I'd told him not to do.
Gagah wanted to drive it around the village. I said absolutely not, then negotiated down to him driving it the length of the lane and back while I supervised. He was unnecessarily enthusiastic about this twenty-meter exercise. "It's so smooth," he kept saying. "And big. I feel very important."
"You're driving at eight kilometers per hour in a lane barely wider than the car," I said.
"Still," he said.
That evening, we had dinner on the porch — my mother's gado-gado, sayur asem, and nasi uduk. My father asked detailed questions about how the PHEV charging worked, how much electricity it used, how the system decided when to switch between battery and engine. He followed my explanations with the same careful attention he used to apply to weather patterns and their effects on the rice harvest: practical, systematic, interested in the variables that affected outcomes.
"So it learns when to use which power source?" he said.
"It calculates continuously," I said. "Based on speed, load, battery level, driving conditions."
He considered this for a moment. "Like deciding when to irrigate," he said.
I looked at him. "Kind of, yes. Exactly like that, actually."
He smiled. "Smart."
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Part Eight: The Routine
September 2026 now. This is my system:
Odd-numbered dates: VF 3. My little yellow hatchback. Still bouncy, still aurally challenged in the speakers department, still running strong on its battery subscription. Still the most fun thing to throw around Jakarta's side streets on a busy morning.
Even-numbered dates: Tiggo 8. Which means I pull into the airport crew parking in something that causes a visible uptick in glances from colleagues who are used to seeing me emerge from a yellow box. Captain Hendra has started calling it "the Berlian executive shuttle," which I find both annoying and secretly gratifying.
The two-car rotation works better than I'd hoped. The odd-even system forces me to be somewhat organized — I check the date the night before, charge whichever car is going next, prepare accordingly. It's not the effortless freedom of being able to drive whatever I want whenever I want, but it's workable. More than workable. The VF 3 handles the city runs and quick errands with its usual cheerful competence. The Tiggo 8 handles the more significant days — the longer commute when I have a full day of training or simulator sessions, the drives when I'm picking up camera equipment or have colleagues to transport, the road trips that would have required careful battery management in the VF 3.
My monthly fuel and electricity costs have continued to drop. The Tiggo 8's hybrid efficiency is real — I'm using far less petrol than any comparable-sized conventional SUV would require. And the months when I'm doing predominantly short city commutes in both cars, my combined running costs are lower than what I was spending on the Agya alone.
The financial picture required some adjustment. Losing the Agya's installments freed up some cash. The Tiggo 8's five-year installment is manageable at my current salary, and I've been accumulating flight hours steadily — TIA has been expanding its routes, and first officers with my qualifications have been getting more roster time. My trajectory toward a captain's license is on track, and with it, a significant salary increase. The master's degree in aviation management I've been deferring is back on the planning horizon.
I'm not going to pretend the situation is perfect. Two car payments, two insurance premiums, two parking fees at 300,000 per spot per month — the vehicle overhead is significant. When I sit down and add up all the transport-related expenses in my monthly budget, I stare at the number for a while. The government regulation forced me into a financial position I hadn't planned for.
But.
Both cars earn their places. The VF 3 is exactly what it always was — a practical, characterful city runabout that I've grown genuinely fond of. And the Tiggo 8 has, over these first few months, revealed itself to be more car than I expected at its price point. The interior feels premium in a way that doesn't quite match the 450 million rupiah sticker. The technology is genuinely functional, not just feature-listed. The drivetrain is polished and capable. When I've had friends in the car who don't know what it cost, they've assumed it was more expensive than it was. That's the best kind of value.
I was at Soekarno-Hatta on a Tuesday morning a few weeks ago, getting out of the Tiggo 8 in the crew parking lot, when I ran into Fariz. He looked at the car, then at me.
"How's the big SUV?" he said.
"Comfortable," I said. "Quiet. Good fuel efficiency. The ADAS tried to drive me insane but I fixed that."
"Still think you needed all that car?"
I thought about it. I thought about the drive to Ciguguk, the morning light over the Cipularang hills, my father patting the roof and saying "solid." I thought about the evenings when I get back from a long day's flying and the Tiggo 8 just absorbs the road underneath me all the way home, smooth and composed, and I arrive at my apartment not feeling beaten up by Jakarta's infrastructure.
"Yes," I said.
He shrugged. "Fair enough."
---
Epilogue
I called my mother last week. Standard check-in call, mid-evening, while I was making tea in my apartment in Kalideres. She asked about work. I told her the Boeing 787 captain position was getting closer — TIA had started the selection process for a new class of widebody qualified first officers, and my name was in consideration. She made the pleased sound she makes when she's trying not to seem too excited. Her voice dropped into that particular tone she uses when she wants to say something meaningful but doesn't want to oversell it.
"How's the big black car?" she asked.
"Good," I said. "Comfortable. I drove it to Ciguguk last month."
"I remember. It's very large for a lane that small."
"I know. I was very careful."
A pause. Then: "Your father has been telling people about it. The farmer down the road, a few others. He explains how the engine works. The electric part and the petrol part."
I smiled. "Does he explain it correctly?"
"Mostly. He compares it to irrigation scheduling."
"That's actually a pretty good analogy."
Another pause. "You always make the best of difficult situations," she said. The same thing she'd said about the VF 3 last year.
I looked around my apartment. Aviation memorabilia on the walls. The Sundanese artifacts from Ciguguk. My photography equipment stacked neatly in the corner, waiting for the next long weekend. Two sets of car keys on the hook by the door — one for a yellow Vietnamese hatchback, one for a black Chinese SUV.
"The government forced my hand," I said.
"The government always forces someone's hand," she said, with the equanimity of someone who has watched rice prices fluctuate for thirty years and learned to plant anyway.
She was right. You adapt. You calculate, you research, you find the solution that fits your actual life rather than the life you'd planned. The Tiggo 8 CSH wasn't in my five-year plan in any year prior to 2026. Neither was the VF 3, really. Neither, for that matter, was living in Kalideres, or flying Boeing 737s, or having more than 50,000 Instagram followers who apparently want to watch me take photographs of Indonesian coastlines from cruising altitude.
Life is unpredictable. Cars are just one of the ways that unpredictability manifests.
The Jakarta morning comes early when you have a 6 AM check-in. Tomorrow is an even-numbered date, which means the Tiggo 8 comes out of the parking garage, points its illuminated Chery grille toward the Sedyatmo toll road, and carries me to the airport in the quiet, composed, efficient way it's been doing for three months now. I'll put it in EV mode for the toll road. I'll use the Blind Spot Detection and nothing else from the ADAS suite. I'll arrive with battery to spare and enough time for coffee before briefing.
Eight out of ten for the VF 3. I stand by that.
The Tiggo 8? I'm not ready to rate it definitively yet — it's only been three months. Ask me again at the one-year mark, after a full wet season and more accumulated kilometers. But if you forced me to put a number on it today, right now, based on everything I've experienced?
Eight and a half. Maybe nine.
Not perfect. But better than I expected, bought under circumstances I resented, filling a role I didn't plan for, and surprising me a little more every week.
That's not nothing. In fact, for a car I was essentially compelled to buy by government policy, it's pretty damn good.
Now, if the Jakarta government could just leave my license plates alone for the next twelve months, I would greatly appreciate it.
—
Story and characters: Berlian the Indonesian dhole ©
A brown dhole from Indonesia
Art by:
tony07734123/KangWolf
Follow my Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/judyreinard.bsky.social and my Twitter https://x.com/judyreinard
by Berlian
---
Part One: The Announcement That Ruined My January
I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. Early January 2026, sitting in the crew briefing room at Terminal 3 Soekarno-Hatta, stirring terrible vending machine coffee and half-listening to one of the senior captains talk about the new ATC frequency changes over the Java corridor. My phone buzzed with a Jakarta news notification, and I figured it was something boring — another flood warning, another road closure, something I could scroll past. Instead, I read the headline twice, then a third time, just to make sure I wasn't misreading it through sleep-deprived eyes after a 4 AM check-in.
Governor Announces Odd-Even Extension to Electric Vehicles Starting 4 January 2027.
I put my phone face-down on the table, took a very long sip of my terrible coffee, and stared at the ceiling.
Captain Hendra, who was sitting across from me, noticed my expression. "Bad news?"
"The government," I said, "has decided to ruin my life again."
He laughed. He didn't know I was serious.
See, here's the thing. When the original odd-even rule for non-electric private cars expanded to all of Jakarta back in early 2026, I had technically already solved the problem. I had two cars: my yellow 2023 Toyota Agya GR Sport with plate B 3 RLN, and my yellow 2025 VinFast VF 3 with plate B 2903 THD. Both odd. But the VF 3 was electric, and at the time, EVs were exempt. So I'd worked out this tidy little system — drive the VF 3 whenever I felt like it, drive the Agya when I needed more range for a longer trip, and technically never be blocked by the odd-even rule because at least one of my cars was always legal to drive.
Neat, right? Government-proof, almost.
Well. Almost.
B 2903 THD — odd. B 3 RLN — odd. Both of them, odd. I'd never thought much about it because the VF 3's exemption made it irrelevant. But now, starting January 2027, EVs would lose that exemption. Both my cars would be restricted on even-numbered dates. The same dates. Simultaneously.
I could already picture it: January 4th, 2027. An even-numbered date. I've got a morning flight. I wake up at 4 AM, go down to my apartment's parking garage, and look at two cars I legally cannot drive to work. My options would be grabbing a taxi, taking the airport bus from the Kalideres stop, or just never sleeping again so I could leave before the restricted hours began.
None of those are acceptable. I'm a pilot. I have a very specific relationship with schedules and reliability. I cannot afford to miss a briefing because my Transjakarta bus decided to take a scenic route through Tangerang.
I went home after that shift and sat on my couch for a long time, thinking.
Then I started doing math.
---
Part Two: The Logic of a Third Car (Yes, Really)
I want to be clear: buying a third car was not something I ever planned to do in my life. I grew up in Ciguguk, near Cimahi in West Java, in a family where my father grew rice and my mother made every rupiah stretch until it screamed. The idea of owning three cars would have seemed like a fever dream to the version of me who shared a boarding house bathroom with five other university students in Bandung. And yet, here I was, a 30-year-old first officer at Trans Indonesia Airlines, sitting on my couch in Kalideres with a spreadsheet open on my laptop, calculating whether I could afford a third vehicle.
The government had, as I suspected, designed this whole situation specifically to make people buy cars. I have no evidence of this. I also have no evidence it's not true.
Okay, so: what kind of third car did I actually need?
The VF 3 was my city car. Good for the commute, great for Jakarta chaos, cheap to run, fun to drive, fits in tiny parking spots. I love it, quirks and all. But it has real limitations — the range anxiety on longer trips, the firm suspension, the sad air conditioning. It's not going anywhere. I wasn't selling it.
The Agya was my road trip backup. Good range, comfortable enough, reliable as a Swiss watch. The problem was the plate — B 3 RLN, odd. If I kept both the VF 3 and the Agya, I'd still be stuck on even dates after January 2027.
So I needed something new. Something with an even plate. That much was clear.
But I'd also been living with the VF 3 for about a year now, and I'd grown accustomed to the driving experience — instant torque, smooth acceleration, low running costs. Going back to a full petrol car felt like a step backward. Especially with what was happening in the Middle East. Fuel prices in Indonesia had been creeping up steadily through 2025 and into 2026, with the regional conflict keeping oil markets nervous. The days of cheap petrol felt numbered.
At the same time, a pure EV wasn't the right answer either. The VF 3 had taught me that much. For city commutes? Perfect. For driving 175 kilometers to West Java to visit my parents? A test of endurance and patience. I'd done that trip in the VF 3 once and spent the entire return journey watching the battery percentage with the same focused anxiety I reserve for monitoring fuel on a low-fuel flight. I didn't need more of that in my life.
The answer presented itself gradually, the way most obvious answers do: a plug-in hybrid.
Charge it at home, run on electricity for the daily Kalideres-to-Soekarno-Hatta commute — around 25 to 30 kilometers each way. Then, for the longer trips, the petrol engine handles it. Best of both worlds. Lower running costs than a pure petrol car, none of the range anxiety of a pure EV. In theory, it was perfect.
And while I was at it — I wanted something bigger.
I know. I know how that sounds. I'm a small-car person. Always have been. The Agya, the VF 3 — I've always gravitated toward compact, nimble, city-friendly cars. But after spending time in the VF 3's tight cabin and constantly dealing with the firm-suspension beating on Jakarta's broken roads, something in me wanted space. Real space. A car where I could sit with my flight bag, camera gear, and a proper amount of legroom without feeling like I was folding myself into a suitcase. The VF 3 was great, but it was honest about being a budget city car. I wanted something that felt like it respected my time on this earth.
An SUV PHEV. Under 500 million rupiah OTR, which was the absolute ceiling I could manage on a five-year loan after accounting for the VF 3's remaining installments and battery subscription, the Agya's last two years of payments, and the various other financial commitments I'd accumulated. (Yes, I was still paying for the Agya. The timing was terrible.)
Budget set. Category set. Now I had to figure out the details.
---
Part Three: Selling the Agya, and Hating Every Part of It
This was harder than I expected.
Logically, I knew I had to sell the Agya. Two reasons: I couldn't afford to keep paying for a car I could no longer use effectively once the 2027 rule kicked in, and clearing the remaining installments would free up financial breathing room for the new car's monthly payments.
Emotionally? That little yellow car and I had been through a lot together. Two and a half years and 35,000 kilometers. Airport runs at 4 AM. The trip to Ciguguk and back. Rainy season drives where the Jakarta flood maps might as well have been abstract art. The Agya had never let me down, not once.
And then there was the plate.
B 3 RLN.
I'd been so pleased with myself when I got that. My name is Berlian. B 3 RLN. It wasn't exact, but it was close enough that every time I parked the car, I smiled a little. A tiny, private vanity project. And now I had to give it up because the provincial government decided that exempting EVs from the odd-even rule was getting too complicated.
I'm not bitter. (I'm extremely bitter.)
The process of settling the installments and preparing for sale took most of February and March 2026. I spent probably too many hours on OLX and CarHub Indonesia, researching what used Agyas were fetching. The GR Sport variant held its value better than the standard LCGC version — some benefit to paying the premium for the non-LCGC badge, I suppose. I eventually sold it to a young guy from Cibubur who drove out to Kalideres with his father to inspect it. He was maybe 22, first car, couldn't stop grinning when he sat in the driver's seat. The GR Sport badges, the sport seats, the red stitching — he loved all of it. He didn't care about the "e-taxi car" reputation at all. Just like I hadn't, years ago.
I handed over the key and stood in the parking garage watching them drive it away. The plate said B 3 RLN one last time, then disappeared around the corner of the access ramp.
"Government conspiracy," I muttered to nobody, then went back upstairs to look at PHEV listings.
---
Part Four: Two Candidates, One Winner
The market for affordable PHEVs in Indonesia in early 2026 was, to put it diplomatically, limited. The truly good options — Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, Toyota RAV4 PHEV, the Korean options — all sat well above my 500 million budget. Twice my budget, to be precise — thanks, import taxes. I scrolled through listings feeling increasingly frustrated until I landed on the two that actually fit:
Chery Tiggo 8 CSH Comfort — Rp 450 million
Wuling Darion PHEV CE — Rp 450 million
Both at exactly the same price. Both launched in Indonesia within a few months of each other. Both PHEV systems promising reasonable EV range for city driving. Both are locally assembled so no import taxes. On paper, they were almost eerily competitive.
I spent three weeks researching before I even contacted a dealership. I read every review I could find in Indonesian and English. I watched YouTube videos. I interrogated TIA colleagues who'd test-driven similar cars. I joined a couple of Indonesian car forums under a pseudonym just to read owner discussions. (Not something I'm proud of. Aviation people, we do our homework.)
Here's what I found about the Darion: solid PHEV credentials, better pure-EV range than the Tiggo, comfortable enough interior. The reviews were generally positive about the driving experience.
But.
It's a minivan.
I want to be very clear about how I feel about this. I have nothing against minivans as a category of vehicle. They are practical, efficient, good for families. Many sensible people drive minivans. Those people are different from me. I have spent my entire adult life deliberately not being perceived as soft or delicate or domestic. I grew up as the only daughter in a family of four brothers, playing football in the rice paddies, climbing the tallest trees in Ciguguk to watch planes from above, and later fighting for a spot in a profession where people still sometimes do double-takes when I walk through the crew door. I wear my tomboyish nature like a badge.
I was not going to drive a minivan.
Some of my colleagues at TIA found this very funny when I explained it. Captain Hendra, who drives a sensible Toyota Kijang Innova, laughed for about a minute and a half. "You're choosing a car based on vibes?" he said.
"I'm choosing a car based on identity," I said. "There's a difference."
He laughed harder. I ignored him.
The Tiggo 8 CSH, on the other hand, was an SUV. A proper, upright, wide-shouldered, commanding SUV. When I looked at pictures of it online, something in me relaxed. That was a car that looked like it meant business. A big, assertive front grille with the illuminated Chery logo. Full LED headlights with that tiger-eye design. The tall, solid stance on 19-inch alloy wheels with 235/50 R19 rubber. This was a car that said, very clearly: I am not messing around.
Coming from the small, low, slightly toy-like VF 3, the idea of sitting up high in something like the Tiggo 8 felt genuinely appealing. Not in a compensation kind of way — in a practical, confidence kind of way. Bigger car, better sightlines in Jakarta's chaotic traffic. More presence on the road. People pay attention to SUVs in a way they don't pay attention to tiny hatchbacks.
I booked test drives at both dealerships on the same weekend.
The Darion test drive confirmed my aesthetic opinion. Nothing wrong with how it drove. But sitting in it, I kept thinking about school pickup runs and family road trips, neither of which I was interested in. I thanked the salesperson, took their brochure, and left.
The Tiggo 8 CSH dealership was a different experience entirely.
The moment I saw the Comfort trim in Black sitting in the showroom, something clicked. The illuminated logo grille caught the overhead lights. The roofline was tall and purposeful. Hidden door handles — a small detail I hadn't fully registered in photos, but seeing them in person, I understood immediately. It looked clean. Modern. Almost aggressively understated in a way that somehow felt premium rather than plain.
My test drive salesperson was a chevrotain woman named Dian, maybe a few years younger than me, who didn't flinch when I started asking technical questions about the powertrain. She knew her stuff. We talked about the 1.5-litre dedicated hybrid engine, the DHT transmission, the drive motor and how the SUPER HEV + EV system balanced between electric and petrol. She walked me through the battery specs, the 90-plus kilometers of pure EV range, the comprehensive range of over 1,300 kilometers on a full tank and full battery. She showed me the specs sheet: 215 kilowatts of combined system output, 310 Newton-meters of torque from the drive motor, the eight-second 0 to 100 time.
That last number caught my attention. Eight seconds to a hundred, in an SUV that weighs and carries what it weighs and carries. The electric motor handles the initial punch. You feel it immediately off the line — no hesitation, no waiting for a combustion engine to build revs.
I've flown aircraft with a rotation speed of 150 knots. I'm not easily impressed by car acceleration. But that departure from standstill in the Tiggo 8 — the way the electric torque just shoved the car forward before I'd even fully committed to pressing the accelerator — that got my attention.
I drove it out onto the test route, which ran along some of the wider roads near the dealership and included a section of decent city traffic. The car steered with surprising confidence given its size. The wheelbase is 2,710 millimeters and the overall length is 4,725 millimeters — this is not a small car. But the steering felt direct, and the view from the driver's seat, sitting high over most of the traffic, was immediately reassuring. I could see everything. The seven-seater cabin behind me felt like a comfortable living room.
The infotainment system — a massive 15.6-inch capacitive touchscreen in the center console — was responsive. Not the slightest hint of the three-second lag I'd grown to despise in the VF 3's system. The Snapdragon 8155 chip running behind it was obviously not a budget afterthought. The 10.25-inch LCD cluster in front of the driver was clear and readable in the afternoon sunlight.
The AR HUD system projected navigation directions and speed information onto the windscreen in a way that was genuinely useful rather than gimmicky. As someone who spends her working hours with flight instruments arrayed across a cockpit panel, I appreciate well-designed information displays. This was well-designed.
I tested the seats. The Comfort trim driver's seat had six-way electric adjustment, and I found my preferred position quickly — I like sitting slightly lower than most Indonesian drivers, closer to how I sit in an aircraft seat, with the steering wheel tilted just so. The front passenger had a four-way electric seat. And the second row — I slid back there during a brief stop just to check — had enough space that even at my 175 centimeters, I wasn't pressed against the front seat. The third row had space, too, though I'd likely use it for cargo more than passengers.
By the time we got back to the dealership, I'd already made up my mind.
The Darion had better pure-EV range on paper. That was real, and I acknowledged it. But the Tiggo 8 CSH Comfort offered me something the Darion couldn't: the feeling that I was in the right vehicle for who I am. And Chery's warranty package was genuinely impressive. Six-year vehicle warranty. Ten-year engine warranty. Eight-year powertrain battery warranty. Four years of free maintenance. Three years of free roadside assistance. For a Chinese brand trying to establish trust in the Indonesian market, Chery clearly understood that the warranty was part of the value proposition.
The Tiggo 8 wasn't a brand-new model — Chery had been selling it in Indonesia long enough that early owners had racked up real-world kilometers and real-world experiences. Reviews from owners were generally positive. The CSH specifically had been refined through feedback. That gave me more confidence than I would have had with a brand-new product launch.
I came back to see Dian the next day and told her I wanted the Comfort trim, in Black.
---
Part Five: Waiting, and Being Impatient About It
I placed the order in April 2026. Delivery was estimated for June. Two months of waiting.
I know how to be patient. It's a professional requirement. I have sat in holding patterns for 45 minutes waiting for a slot to land at Soekarno-Hatta. I have pre-flighted aircraft in the pouring rain without rushing. But waiting for a car I've already paid a deposit on is a uniquely annoying kind of impatience.
I kept finding excuses to drive past the dealership. I told myself it was on my way to things. It wasn't, really.
During that waiting period, I also dealt with the practical question of the plate. I was very specific with the dealership: I needed an even-numbered plate. After the B 3 RLN situation, I was taking no chances. Dian understood — a lot of customers had been making similar requests since the odd-even announcement.
The plate I received was B 2276 SJD.
B-2-2-7-6. The 2s made me happy. Even, definitively, unambiguously even. I stared at the plate number for a while when Dian sent me the preview. A small relief, but a real one.
The call came in early June: my Tiggo 8 was ready for collection.
I drove the VF 3 to the dealership. A colleague from TIA, a first officer named Fariz who'd been listening to me talk about this purchase for months, came along because I'd threatened to make him come along if I had to hear him say "SUV drivers are insecure" one more time. He'd made that comment in the crew room and refused to retract it until he saw the actual car. Once he did, he went quiet for a moment, then said, "Okay, that is a good-looking car."
I handed over the VF 3 keys to Dian for safekeeping while we did the handover paperwork. Fariz took about forty photographs of the Black Tiggo 8 in the delivery bay, which I will pretend was entirely his idea.
The drive home from the dealership, heading east on Jalan Daan Mogot, back toward Kalideres, was the kind of drive that reminds you why cars are more than just transportation. Jakarta was hot and humid, the traffic was predictably chaotic, motorcycles wove between lanes with their usual creative disregard for lane markings. But I was sitting in something new, something big and quiet and composed, and the city looked different from up here.
---
Part Six: The First Few Months
August 2026. About two months into ownership. Here's what I know.
The car is genuinely quieter than anything I've owned. In EV mode, which is where I spend most of my time commuting to and from Soekarno-Hatta, the cabin is almost eerily still. Just the whisper of tires on pavement and the distant rumble of Jakarta outside the glass. The PM2.5/N95 air filter means the interior air quality is noticeably better than outside — relevant in Jakarta, where the air quality index is a source of ongoing national embarrassment. The front silent glass helps too. I've started to notice, coming from the VF 3 with its wind noise at highway speeds and the Agya with its regular city-car din, just how much acoustic engineering Chery put into this car's cabin.
The EV range comfortably covers my commute. Kalideres to Soekarno-Hatta Terminal 3 is about 12 kilometers by my usual route via Jalan Raya Kalideres, then onto the Sedyatmo toll road. Round trip, maybe 25 to 30 kilometers depending on whether I need to stop anywhere on the way home. The Tiggo 8 CSH Comfort's pure EV range is quoted at 90-plus kilometers. In practice, with air conditioning on and the usual Jakarta stop-and-go, I'm getting somewhere in the mid-80s. More than enough for my daily use. I typically plug in overnight when I'm home, and I arrive at the airport on days I use the Tiggo 8 with a battery well above 50 percent.
The charging at my apartment complex costs 3,000 rupiah per kilowatt-hour — the same rate I've been paying for the VF 3. A full charge on the Tiggo 8's 18.3 kilowatt-hour battery costs around 55,000 rupiah. For a week of daily commuting, the electricity cost is negligible. The hybrid system's efficiency in HEV mode, when the battery has been discharged and the petrol engine kicks in, is rated at over 19 kilometers per liter. That's genuinely impressive for an SUV this size. My fuel costs for the occasional longer drive have been significantly lower than I expected.
The driving experience deserves its own section.
That eight-second 0-to-100 figure is honest. When you press the accelerator with intent, the electric motor delivers before your conscious mind has fully finished forming the thought. The response is immediate and linear in a way that combustion engines simply aren't. Coming from the VF 3, where I'd grown used to electric delivery, the Tiggo 8 doesn't feel like a step down — it feels like the same principle but with considerably more force behind it. The 310 Newton-meters of drive motor torque is most apparent in the mid-range, when you're on the toll road and need to close a gap quickly or execute an overtake. The car surges forward without drama, without downshifting, without any of the hesitation you get from a conventional automatic transmission hunting for the right gear.
I never drive above 120 kilometers per hour on the toll road, as a general rule. Flight crew are supposed to be responsible road users, and I'd like to think I am. But I can tell the car is comfortable well above that. It sits planted and composed, no chassis float, no steering nervousness. The independent suspension at both front and rear absorbs Jakarta's road imperfections with noticeably more grace than the VF 3 ever managed. My spine has been sending me fewer complaints.
The seven-seat configuration means there's interior space I've never had in a car before. Third row aside — which I fold flat for the cargo space — the second row is genuinely comfortable for adult passengers. I've taken a couple of fellow pilots to dinner in it, and nobody had to fold themselves into awkward positions. The wide space trunk with the flat surface when you fold everything down has already been useful for transporting camera equipment and, on one memorable occasion, helping a neighbor move a piece of furniture that seemed designed to not fit in any normal car.
Now. About the ADAS.
The Tiggo 8 CSH comes equipped with 14 Advanced Driving Assistance System features. This includes Lane Departure Warning, Lane Keeping Assist, Lane Departure Prevention, Integrated Cruise Assist, Adaptive Cruise Control, Front Collision Warning, Autonomous Emergency Braking, Blind Spot Detection, Door Opening Warning, and several others. In theory, this is an impressive suite of safety technology. In theory.
In practice, every single ADAS feature on the Tiggo 8 CSH is tuned as though the engineer who designed it was deeply terrified of litigation and had also never driven in Indonesia.
The first day I drove on the Sedyatmo toll road with the ADAS fully active, the car beeped at me twenty times in four kilometers. Twenty. I counted. I am not joking. Lane Departure Warning triggered because I drifted slightly left while watching a minibus cut across three lanes in front of me. Front Collision Warning activated because a motorcycle got within what it apparently considered an unacceptable proximity, despite the motorcycle being a completely normal distance away by any real-world Jakarta standard. The system seemed genuinely surprised that other vehicles existed on the road.
I tried lowering the sensitivity. The system still beeped, just with slightly less conviction. I spent a week adjusting various combinations of settings, testing them on my commute, and finding new and creative ways to be beeped at. On the third day, while the Lane Keeping Assist actually nudged the steering against my input because I was changing lanes — while my turn signal was on, I should add — I made my decision.
I went through the settings methodically and disabled every ADAS feature except the Blind Spot Detection. For BSD, I kept the visual warning (the icon lights up in the wing mirror) but turned off the audio and haptic alerts. This is the one ADAS function that has been genuinely, immediately useful in Jakarta's traffic. When a motorcycle is hiding in my blind spot as I'm preparing to change lanes, that amber glow in the mirror is valuable information delivered quietly and without drama.
Everything else: off.
I mentioned this to Fariz when we were in the crew room between flights. He seemed concerned. "You're disabling safety features?"
"I'm disabling features that are making me a worse driver by distracting me constantly," I said. "If I'm responding to false alarms twenty times on a four-kilometer road, my attention is on the beeping, not on the road. That's not safer. That's noisier."
He thought about it. "Fair point," he eventually admitted.
In aviation, we have a concept called automation complacency — when you rely too heavily on automated systems and your own situational awareness degrades as a result. The ADAS features, the way they were tuned in this car for Indonesian traffic conditions, weren't adding to my safety. They were creating workload. Pilots are trained to manage workload, to prioritize information, to turn off systems that are generating more noise than signal. I applied the same principle to my car. Problem solved.
---
Part Seven: Ciguguk
August. A long weekend aligned with my rostered days off, which almost never happens — scheduling at TIA seems engineered to ensure pilots never have consecutive free days near public holidays. When it did happen, I had one destination in mind.
I'd taken the VF 3 to Ciguguk once, back in late 2025. That trip had involved two charging stops, a total journey time of about five hours for what should be 175 kilometers, and enough battery anxiety to give me a mild existential crisis somewhere on the Cipularang toll road. I'd driven the Agya there many times — comfortable, easy, relaxed. But now the Agya was gone, and the VF 3 was not the right tool for this job.
The Tiggo 8 CSH Comfort was.
I left Kalideres at 6 AM, which is my preferred departure time for any drive west — early enough to miss the worst of Jakarta's morning congestion, early enough to arrive before the midday heat peaks. The car was on a full charge, 100 percent battery, plus I'd filled the tank the day before. Comprehensive range estimated by the system: over 700 kilometers. I had no battery anxiety. I had no fuel anxiety. I had, for the first time in a long time, a road trip that felt genuinely free.
The Sedyatmo toll road out of the airport direction connects smoothly toward the Jakarta Outer Ring Road, which I took southeast toward the Cipularang entrance. It was a Tuesday, still dark when I left, the toll booths sparse and efficient. By the time the sun came up properly over the eastern hills, I was already past Karawang, cruising at a steady 100 kilometers per hour in the right lane, sipping from a travel mug of coffee I'd prepared the night before.
The car is a different experience on the highway than in the city. In the city, it's about the electric motor, the torque, the agility. On the highway, the petrol engine has taken over much of the load — the battery was well-depleted by this point from the city driving portion — and the car settles into a composed, quiet cruise. The combined system power means maintaining highway speeds takes no effort whatsoever. The adaptive cruise control, which I was using since nobody had told me to beeped at me about it yet on the open highway, held a steady gap to the vehicle ahead. Wind noise at 100 was minimal. Road noise filtered through the substantial body structure. I listened to a podcast through the Android Auto connection — a discussion about sustainable aviation fuel that I'd been meaning to catch up on — and genuinely forgot, for about 45 minutes, that I was navigating any particular road.
The Cipularang toll road climbs through the mountains west of Bandung, and this is where the car revealed another side of itself. The gradient is steep in places — this is the section where underpowered trucks sometimes crawl and occasionally stall in the slow lane. The Tiggo 8 climbed without complaint, the combined hybrid output maintaining speed without the transmission hunting or the engine straining. Passing slower vehicles on the uphill sections required nothing more than a firm press of the accelerator, and the response was immediate.
I know these roads well. I've driven this route in the Agya, which handled the grades fine but felt like it was working. I've taken the high-speed train from Halim to Padalarang, which is faster and easier. I've flown into Husein Sastranegara a handful of times for regional flights. But driving into West Java in your own car, with the mountains visible above the toll road barriers and the temperature dropping a degree or two as you climb — there's something about it that the train can't replicate.
I was in Ciguguk by 9 AM. Three hours, no stops, no anxiety.
My parents' house is in a quiet residential lane off the main road through Ciguguk, about ten minutes from the Cimahi city center. The family home is the same traditional wooden structure I grew up in, though my parents have added a small tiled porch in recent years and my mother has turned a corner of the yard into an impressive herb and vegetable garden. I pulled the Tiggo 8 into the lane and immediately realized that the car was extremely large relative to the narrow road. I had maybe half a meter of clearance on either side. I negotiated this slowly and carefully, inch by inch, and parked at the end of the lane with the car mostly on my family's small concrete yard.
I got out and looked at it. The Black paint was dusty from the toll road, but even under dust, the car looked substantial. The illuminated Chery logo had turned itself off since the engine was stopped, but the full LED headlights caught the morning light in a way that made the car look expensive. Almost too expensive for this quiet lane with its tin-roofed houses and small vegetable plots.
My father came out of the front door before I'd even closed the car door.
Sutoyo is 62 years old now, a retired rice farmer who spends most of his time tending a small kitchen garden and watching the same three television channels with great dedication. He has never expressed much interest in cars specifically, but he has strong opinions about things being built well or badly. He walked slowly around the Tiggo 8, hands clasped behind his back, the way he used to walk around rice plants checking for disease.
"This is yours?" he said.
"Mine," I confirmed.
He bent slightly to look at the hidden door handles — or rather, at where he expected door handles to be, and found smooth body panels instead. Then he found the recessed handle, pressed it, felt the door release. He nodded slowly, the way he nods at things he finds technically interesting.
"Chinese car," he said, not as a criticism, just as an observation.
"Chery," I said. "Yes."
"Heavy?"
"Very."
He nodded again. Patted the roof with one hand. "Solid," he said. That was his highest form of automotive approval.
My mother Tini came out next, drying her hands on a dish towel, and her reaction was more direct: "Wah, besar sekali." Very big. Then she looked at me. "Can you even see out of it properly?"
"The visibility is excellent," I said.
"It's very black," she said. "You'll bake in it."
"That's what the climate control is for."
She looked unconvinced, the way she always looks when modern technology is offered as a substitute for common sense. But she touched the side panel, registered the solid thud it gave back, and said, "Good. Doesn't sound hollow." She knows build quality from years of evaluating everything from furniture to cooking pots. She approved of the panel solidity.
My brothers were more vocal. Raja, the mechanic, wanted to look under the hood immediately. He has an instinctive suspicion of hybrid systems — too many components, too much complexity, too many things to go wrong. I let him examine the engine bay while I tried to explain the DHT transmission in terms that would make sense to someone who normally works on two-stroke motorcycles and aging Japanese sedans.
"Where's the timing belt?" he said.
"It's a dedicated hybrid engine. Different architecture."
He gave me the look he reserves for things he considers unnecessarily complicated.
Teguh and Gagah, my twin brothers finishing their computer science degrees, were more interested in the infotainment system. Teguh immediately started asking about the Snapdragon chip and whether the system was rootable. I told him not to try. He looked at the 15.6-inch touchscreen with the expression of someone already planning something I'd told him not to do.
Gagah wanted to drive it around the village. I said absolutely not, then negotiated down to him driving it the length of the lane and back while I supervised. He was unnecessarily enthusiastic about this twenty-meter exercise. "It's so smooth," he kept saying. "And big. I feel very important."
"You're driving at eight kilometers per hour in a lane barely wider than the car," I said.
"Still," he said.
That evening, we had dinner on the porch — my mother's gado-gado, sayur asem, and nasi uduk. My father asked detailed questions about how the PHEV charging worked, how much electricity it used, how the system decided when to switch between battery and engine. He followed my explanations with the same careful attention he used to apply to weather patterns and their effects on the rice harvest: practical, systematic, interested in the variables that affected outcomes.
"So it learns when to use which power source?" he said.
"It calculates continuously," I said. "Based on speed, load, battery level, driving conditions."
He considered this for a moment. "Like deciding when to irrigate," he said.
I looked at him. "Kind of, yes. Exactly like that, actually."
He smiled. "Smart."
---
Part Eight: The Routine
September 2026 now. This is my system:
Odd-numbered dates: VF 3. My little yellow hatchback. Still bouncy, still aurally challenged in the speakers department, still running strong on its battery subscription. Still the most fun thing to throw around Jakarta's side streets on a busy morning.
Even-numbered dates: Tiggo 8. Which means I pull into the airport crew parking in something that causes a visible uptick in glances from colleagues who are used to seeing me emerge from a yellow box. Captain Hendra has started calling it "the Berlian executive shuttle," which I find both annoying and secretly gratifying.
The two-car rotation works better than I'd hoped. The odd-even system forces me to be somewhat organized — I check the date the night before, charge whichever car is going next, prepare accordingly. It's not the effortless freedom of being able to drive whatever I want whenever I want, but it's workable. More than workable. The VF 3 handles the city runs and quick errands with its usual cheerful competence. The Tiggo 8 handles the more significant days — the longer commute when I have a full day of training or simulator sessions, the drives when I'm picking up camera equipment or have colleagues to transport, the road trips that would have required careful battery management in the VF 3.
My monthly fuel and electricity costs have continued to drop. The Tiggo 8's hybrid efficiency is real — I'm using far less petrol than any comparable-sized conventional SUV would require. And the months when I'm doing predominantly short city commutes in both cars, my combined running costs are lower than what I was spending on the Agya alone.
The financial picture required some adjustment. Losing the Agya's installments freed up some cash. The Tiggo 8's five-year installment is manageable at my current salary, and I've been accumulating flight hours steadily — TIA has been expanding its routes, and first officers with my qualifications have been getting more roster time. My trajectory toward a captain's license is on track, and with it, a significant salary increase. The master's degree in aviation management I've been deferring is back on the planning horizon.
I'm not going to pretend the situation is perfect. Two car payments, two insurance premiums, two parking fees at 300,000 per spot per month — the vehicle overhead is significant. When I sit down and add up all the transport-related expenses in my monthly budget, I stare at the number for a while. The government regulation forced me into a financial position I hadn't planned for.
But.
Both cars earn their places. The VF 3 is exactly what it always was — a practical, characterful city runabout that I've grown genuinely fond of. And the Tiggo 8 has, over these first few months, revealed itself to be more car than I expected at its price point. The interior feels premium in a way that doesn't quite match the 450 million rupiah sticker. The technology is genuinely functional, not just feature-listed. The drivetrain is polished and capable. When I've had friends in the car who don't know what it cost, they've assumed it was more expensive than it was. That's the best kind of value.
I was at Soekarno-Hatta on a Tuesday morning a few weeks ago, getting out of the Tiggo 8 in the crew parking lot, when I ran into Fariz. He looked at the car, then at me.
"How's the big SUV?" he said.
"Comfortable," I said. "Quiet. Good fuel efficiency. The ADAS tried to drive me insane but I fixed that."
"Still think you needed all that car?"
I thought about it. I thought about the drive to Ciguguk, the morning light over the Cipularang hills, my father patting the roof and saying "solid." I thought about the evenings when I get back from a long day's flying and the Tiggo 8 just absorbs the road underneath me all the way home, smooth and composed, and I arrive at my apartment not feeling beaten up by Jakarta's infrastructure.
"Yes," I said.
He shrugged. "Fair enough."
---
Epilogue
I called my mother last week. Standard check-in call, mid-evening, while I was making tea in my apartment in Kalideres. She asked about work. I told her the Boeing 787 captain position was getting closer — TIA had started the selection process for a new class of widebody qualified first officers, and my name was in consideration. She made the pleased sound she makes when she's trying not to seem too excited. Her voice dropped into that particular tone she uses when she wants to say something meaningful but doesn't want to oversell it.
"How's the big black car?" she asked.
"Good," I said. "Comfortable. I drove it to Ciguguk last month."
"I remember. It's very large for a lane that small."
"I know. I was very careful."
A pause. Then: "Your father has been telling people about it. The farmer down the road, a few others. He explains how the engine works. The electric part and the petrol part."
I smiled. "Does he explain it correctly?"
"Mostly. He compares it to irrigation scheduling."
"That's actually a pretty good analogy."
Another pause. "You always make the best of difficult situations," she said. The same thing she'd said about the VF 3 last year.
I looked around my apartment. Aviation memorabilia on the walls. The Sundanese artifacts from Ciguguk. My photography equipment stacked neatly in the corner, waiting for the next long weekend. Two sets of car keys on the hook by the door — one for a yellow Vietnamese hatchback, one for a black Chinese SUV.
"The government forced my hand," I said.
"The government always forces someone's hand," she said, with the equanimity of someone who has watched rice prices fluctuate for thirty years and learned to plant anyway.
She was right. You adapt. You calculate, you research, you find the solution that fits your actual life rather than the life you'd planned. The Tiggo 8 CSH wasn't in my five-year plan in any year prior to 2026. Neither was the VF 3, really. Neither, for that matter, was living in Kalideres, or flying Boeing 737s, or having more than 50,000 Instagram followers who apparently want to watch me take photographs of Indonesian coastlines from cruising altitude.
Life is unpredictable. Cars are just one of the ways that unpredictability manifests.
The Jakarta morning comes early when you have a 6 AM check-in. Tomorrow is an even-numbered date, which means the Tiggo 8 comes out of the parking garage, points its illuminated Chery grille toward the Sedyatmo toll road, and carries me to the airport in the quiet, composed, efficient way it's been doing for three months now. I'll put it in EV mode for the toll road. I'll use the Blind Spot Detection and nothing else from the ADAS suite. I'll arrive with battery to spare and enough time for coffee before briefing.
Eight out of ten for the VF 3. I stand by that.
The Tiggo 8? I'm not ready to rate it definitively yet — it's only been three months. Ask me again at the one-year mark, after a full wet season and more accumulated kilometers. But if you forced me to put a number on it today, right now, based on everything I've experienced?
Eight and a half. Maybe nine.
Not perfect. But better than I expected, bought under circumstances I resented, filling a role I didn't plan for, and surprising me a little more every week.
That's not nothing. In fact, for a car I was essentially compelled to buy by government policy, it's pretty damn good.
Now, if the Jakarta government could just leave my license plates alone for the next twelve months, I would greatly appreciate it.
—
Story and characters: Berlian the Indonesian dhole ©
A brown dhole from IndonesiaArt by:
tony07734123/KangWolf
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