Chinese giant adds a plug-in hybrid SUV to its growing showroom range
MURRAY SCULLION @mscullion2
TESTED 15.5.24, ROME, ITALY ON SALE SEPTEMBER
t’s so quiet in here. Even as I accelerate sharply into the outside lane of Rome’s Grande Raccordo Anulare ring road and the petrol engine wakes from its slumber, the whole car remains eerily hushed. If I hadn’t just sat through an hour-long presentation with a follow-up ‘please explain the gearbox to me like I’m a 10-year-old’ interview, I might even have mistaken it for an EV.
It’s not, though – which is important, because the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs is bringing a combustion-engined car to the UK. There’s a common belief that Chinese firms have leapfrogged competitors from elsewhere in the world because they put all their efforts into going electric early. Broadly in the UK, we think that a lot of Chinese EVs are technically brilliant, whereas the country’s ICE efforts have always been a bit naff. So here I need to find out where the BYD Seal U SUV sits on the scale that ranges from absolutely naff to technically sound.
The Seal U (come on, guys, could you really not think of another sea creature?) combines a 1.5-litre four-cylinder turbo petrol engine, using the Miller cycle (typically suited to forced induction, higher-rev response), with an 18.3kWh battery, one electric motor at the front and another at the rear – which means it’s four-wheel drive. The engine can power the front wheels or the front motor, but the rear wheels can only be powered by the rear motor.
There’s also a front-driven version that uses a different 1.5-litre, normally aspirated Atkinson-cycle petrol four (typically suited to lower-rev efficiency in combination with electric assistance) with the same 18.3kWh battery and a single electric motor at the front.
Our test car is ostensibly fitted with a single-speed transmission, like an EV, but in reality there’s one gear for the electric powertrain, one for the ICE and a reduction gear to mesh the two together.
The front motor has 201bhp, the rear one has 161bhp and the engine has 129bhp, but combined peak power is 319bhp, because they can’t all be used in conjunction.
The drive battery can be charged from 30-80% in around 35 minutes and it comes with vehicle-to-load capability as standard. So outdoorsy types, for example, can benefit by making an espresso at a campsite.
Range? Officially it’s 44 miles on electricity alone or 541 miles with the engine taken into
