BYD SEAL
The third fully electric model from Chinese firm BYD – aka Build Your Dreams – to make it to the UK. And all in the space of nine months. This is clearly the Chinese year of the car. First came the Atto3 crossover, then the ID.3-sized Dolphin, now something purporting to be a flagship, aimed at the Tesla Model 3 and named for another cute seafarer.
The overall aesthetic is one that ought to appeal to European buyers. Not least because it has overtones of cars we’re already familiar with. The Model 3, for sure, but also Hyundai’s Ioniq 6. That’s a more polished machine than this, though. You can tell Seal benchmarked the Tesla, because to drive both feel like they’re going through the motions. It does ride. And handle. It physically does those things, but too much road grumble comes back through the chassis at low speeds, the steering is distant and the damping is too loose to control vertical motion properly. It’s just a little bit... scruffy.
It launches in both rear- and four-wheel-drive iterations, each using the same 82.5kWh battery. The former is £45,695 and offers a 354-mile WLTP range alongside a 308bhp peak for 0–62mph in 5.9 seconds. An extra £3,000 gets you the dual motor, AWD version whose power peaks at 523bhp, taking a chunk out of both its range figure (323 miles) and 0–62mph sprint (3.8secs). Have the base one, the driving experience is less likely to dissatisfy.
There’s more originality inside, with the same curious steering wheel design BYD has used elsewhere,
