Chinese battery giant enters British car market with family-focused crossover
JAMES ATTWOOD
TESTED 7.3.23, WILTSHIRE ON SALE NOW
For a car that brings a bold new player into the UK market, the BYD Atto 3 is disarmingly unassuming. Given the huge ambition of its maker, you might expect a big, splashy statement; instead, here’s a family SUV that carries itself with quiet confidence.
Never heard of BYD? If you own a smartphone or laptop, there’s a good chance this Chinese company made its battery. Been on an electric bus? It might have made that too.
Twenty years ago, it ventured into car making when looking for ways to apply its battery tech. Last year, it sold nearly 1.9 million PHEVs and EVs. It’s an incredible success story, yet one conducted with little fuss.
And that attitude isn’t changing. BYD may be arriving here quietly, but it’s set on having 30 dealerships – yes, that’s right, actual physical dealerships – by the end of this year and around 100 by 2025.
In China, BYD offers a full range of cars spanning all segments, but it’s starting here with just the one.
The Atto 3 is the first car based on BYD’s e-Platform 3.0, which makes full use of the firm’s capabilities. So comprehensively vertically integrated is BYD that it makes its own batteries, motors, drivetrains and semiconductors. That includes the lithium-iron-phosphate Blade Battery, which has its cells mounted in thin strips directly to the pack, apparently allowing for far greater density than conventional batteries.
In the form of the Atto 3, that bold new platform and technology has been used to produce a really quite conventional mid-size SUV, slightly bigger than the Kia Niro EV, slightly smaller than the Volkswagen ID 4.
It will be offered in three trim levels in the UK but with a single powertrain, featuring one 201bhp front-mounted motor and a battery with a usable capacity of 60.48kWh. That gives a decent official range of 260 miles and efficiency of 3.98 miles per kWh, although we averaged closer to 3.2mpkWh on our test route in cold weather.
Speaking of cold weather, the Atto 3 features a heat pump as standard, which isn’t common in this class.
Active trim gets you 7kW AC charging, while Comfort and Design cars raise the limit to 11kW. On a DC rapid charger, they can all be charged at a maximum of 88kW.
BYD’s designers clearly had more fun on the interior than the exterior, and in a good way: everything feels pleasant and there’s real character with just the right amount of quirk.
The dominant feature is the touchscreen, which on our Design test car measured a whopping
