2023 BYD Dolphin Review: Big Splash in Singapore Town

• Design and Interior
• Driving Experience
• Conclusion

The new BYD Dolphin is an all-electric urban hatchback that does its best to cushion the shock of high COE prices in Singapore

2023 BYD Dolphin

Launched July 2023 – Price S$160,888 with COE (July 2023)

Five-door small hatchback, five seats

94hp, single-motor electric, VES A1, 15.2kWh/100km

PROS

Spacious interior

Great amount of standard equipment

Comfortable, quiet drive

CONS

Not a dynamic car

No wireless phone charging

Plasticky controll dials

SINGAPORE

With the state of new car prices the way they are, drivers in Singapore are demanding more from their cars than ever before. It’s a paradox but when you’re paying more than S$130,000 for a compact car like a Suzuki Swift in 2023, when it cost just S$86,000 in 2021, you better pack it full of standard equipment to make it feel worthwhile.

Into this scenario dives the BYD Dolphin, an all-electric hatchback that’s about the size of a Honda Jazz and Jazz Crosstar. With a retail price tag of S$160,888 with COE at time of writing, the BYD Dolphin is officially the cheapest new EV you can buy in Singapore.

The BYD Atto 3 electric SUV set a high standard for its cars, including winning CarBuyer Singapore’s Value Champion of the Year award. Can the Dolphin live up to the standards of its big brother the Atto 3?

Design and Interior

The design of the car is quite unique and bubbly, with EV theme evident from the closed-off front end as there is no need for large amounts for intake air. Daytime running lights at the front are complemented by the squiggly, full-width light beams at the rear. A wide plastic finishing trim piece covers the C-pillars part of the design to blend the windows and sides of the car into one coherent element.

It fits right into the present hatchback styling trends, but there’s also an obvious BYD signature to the way the car has been designed, and that’s a good sign the Chinese carmaker has already shown that it is fully capable of leading the way in mainstream carmaking, with no real need to copy from anywhere else.

The cabin isn’t as radically styled as the Atto 3’s, but the signature BYD rotatable main infotainment screen is here. The native GPS software is excellent and with a SIM card included you can also get Spotify to play almost any song ever recorded, should the radio stations get too boring for you.

The display supports split screen mode in both portrait (vertical) and landscape orientations, so your passenger can search for songs on the Spotify playlist while navigation is unaffected. While the landscape mode of the screen seems more natural, we found that the GPS map displays really far, and in great detail, in portrait mode because the viewing distance ahead is greatly increased.

It also has amazingly effective voice-controlled assistance, similar to what you can find in current BMWs. Feel flustered by all the controls? Say, “Hey BYD,” and tell the car what you want. She’ll acknowledge it in perfect english. Navigation selections and air-conditioning adjustments are the most often used voice-controlled functions in our experience. The same female A.I. voice will nag at you if you or your passengers forget to clip in your seatbelt.

Round blower vents are set across the dashboard, and the door opening levers resemble dolphin flippers. The drive selector is a little toggle on the centre console. It’s tidy, but the actual switchgear could have done with more damping to reduce the wobbly plastic feel.

One curious design element is the big trench-like tray area on top of the dashboard that runs the width of the whale dash. While it looks like a place to dump tissue boxes, we would advise against it. On a bright sunny day, it becomes obvious that the ‘trench’ is a sunken depression that’s designed to completely remove the glare of sunlight reflecting off the dashboard top and onto the front windscreen.

Cubby holes for hiding stuff are everywhere on the centre console, but despite the very obvious mobile phone tray in the middle there is no wireless charging for smartphones. Well, as the most affordable EV in Singapore right now, something’s got to give. The good news is that there are USB ports for both the front and rear seats.

The seats are supportive and comfortable in that sofa-like way, and the flat floor of the rear adds a lot of perceived legroom to the interior.

Right at the back, the boot has a split-level floor and is very roomy for a car of this size too. If you want to really dig into it, build quality is perhaps a tiny percentage lower than what Kia and Hyundai already deliver, but it’s really not bad at all and certainly of a much better standard than what the Mitsubishi Space Star and Attrage used to deliver.

Driving Experience

With just 94 horsepower, the Dolphin was never going to be a very fast car. The electric motor’s responsiveness does deliver on the signature EV feel however, with the car accelerating briskly from standing starts while other lesser, petrol-powered small hatchbacks are still revving their engines.

It’s a comfort-tuned car through and through, with none of the dynamism that rival EVs like the MG4 exhibit. The car comes fitted with Chinese-manufactured, Linglong tyres with low rolling resistance straight from the factory. Comical name aside, it’s a decently quiet tyre in a car that the only other noise you will hear when rolling along is the wind. As an appliance car for drivers that don’t really want to bother with driving excitement the Dolphin suits just fine as it moves as efficiently and quietly as you would expect a little electric car to.

However, driving enthusiasts that hop into one may find that there’s a certain vagueness to the steering within the first five degrees of steering lock. Then the car seems to exhibit a slightly disconcerting yaw angle when you turn in on the steering wheel. It tracks decently, but there’s a slightly odd sensation of the nose of the car alway pointed slightly to the outside of a corner.

There are much more powerful versions of the Dolphin with power outputs of up to 201 horsepower in other countries, but one wonders how they will handle dynamically.

The bottom line is, the car in Singaporean specification is comfortable to drive, but completely unexciting. The good news is that it’s fully equipped with all the niceties you expect from a modern EV, including a full active safety suite that includes lane departure warning, front collision warning, and adaptive cruise control. Yet, we had to live with the slight annoyance of the car’s over-policing of speed limits. The GPS-based system attempts to warn you with a soft “bing bing” chime every time the car creeps over the rated speed limit, and on many urban streets it seems to default to a 50km/h limit warning. The good news is that it stops after a few seconds even if you are above the perceived ‘speed limit’. It’s all software based and so can be deactivated, but we couldn’t find the option so lived with it.

Power efficiency is a mixed bag in a good way. The car’s official specification rates it as having a range of 340km based on the WLTP cycle, but based on the Singapore Land Transport Authority’s homologation figures of battery capacity and power efficiency of 15.2kWh/100km, the total range is only 295km.

The really good news is that in real-world, Singaporean driving conditions, a power efficiency of around 11.5kWh/100km is completely within reach, which, in our driving experience, gives nearly 400km of range before needing a top-up. That’s further than the Opel Mokka-e and its cousin the Peugeot e-2008.

Conclusion

It’s a competent small car for families looking for a decently affordable EV, and its seemingly low power output isn’t really a bad thing when you consider the fact that EV road taxes are calculated based on the car’s power. It certainly doesn’t feel slow, and drives with a solid, stable feel on the highway too.

Cars are expensive right now, whichever way you look at it. But with the BYD Dolphin, the dealership Vantage Automotive is doing its best to deliver as much as possible within the constraints.

BYD Dolphin

*According to battery capacity and LTA homologated efficiency figures

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