BYD Seal review - TopCarNews

Overview
What is it?
What about the interior?
It’s all feeling a little familiar…
Any tech to speak of?
What's the verdict?
Tesla Model 3
Polestar 2
BMW i4
Driving
What is it like to drive?
Uh oh, how did it cope with that?
Say what?
This is all because of laws ‘n’ stuff, isn’t it?
Interior
What is it like on the inside?
Buying
What should I be paying?

Overview

What is it?

The third fully electric model from Chinese firm BYD – aka Build Your Dreams – to make it to the UK. The first was the Atto 3 crossover, the second the more attainable, £25k Dolphin hatchback. Now we get a sports saloon that might not prove the biggest seller of the trio, but which adds some much-needed glamour to a range that’s so far felt a touch prosaic.

It looks smart, at least to our eyes. The proportions are neat and the overall aesthetic is one that ought to welcome European buyers with open arms. Not least because you might identify the flavour of a number of cars we already know quite well. From some angles we can spot an Ioniq 6, from others the sadly defunct Ford Mondeo. Both are handsome cars so a melding of the two is no bad thing.

What about the interior?

There’s more originality inside, with the same curious steering wheel design BYD has carved out elsewhere alongside a rotating 15.6in touchscreen – press a button and it flips electronically between portrait and landscape – and a full-length panoramic roof to help increase the sense of space inside. Something BYD claims is already strong thanks to its ‘blade battery’, assembled onto the frame of the car to both increase body stiffness (the equivalent of a supercar’s, we’re told) and boost legroom for passengers (though the floor is still a little higher than you might hope).

It’s all feeling a little familiar…

BYD exhibits refreshing honesty when it comes to the cars it targets and benchmarks, and however much it might look like its Hyundai rival, just one name seems to have been centric in the Seal’s development: Tesla Model 3. The company knows it won’t snare Tesla customers in an instant but hopes a focus on build quality and comfier dynamics might just work its magic over time.

The Seal makes a strong case for itself on paper. It launches in both rear-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive iterations, each using the same 82.5kWh battery. The former should start at around £45,000 and offers a 354-mile WLTP range alongside a 308bhp peak for 0-62mph in 5.9 seconds. A few grand more will get you a dual motor, AWD version whose power peaks at 523bhp, taking a chunk out of both its range figure (323 miles) and 0-62mph sprint (3.8s). To hammer the point home, this version wears a ‘3.8s’ badge on the boot lid. Gone are the days of a chrome ‘GLX’ providing the company car park kudos.

Any tech to speak of?

Too much, if anything. Each one has three driving modes – Eco, Normal and Sport – and a whole plethora of active safety systems as standard. They’re pretty standard stuff – lane keep, crash detection, speed limit warnings – but prove a dominant part of the driving experience. Perhaps in exactly the way you’re expecting.

The interior feels incredibly well screwed together and with standard quilted leather seats (heated and ventilated, too) there’s a genuinely premium feel to the cabin. Whether you’re brave enough to go for Tahitian blue trim is another issue. It’s also exceedingly refined, with double laminated glass working alongside the silent powertrain to provide a proper luxurious waft about the place. Until those active safety bongs fire into life, of course.

Charging is up to 150kW, which is hardly industry leading, but at least snares you a 10-80 per cent charge in under half an hour, while BYD builds its own batteries – something it’s been doing since the 1990s – supplying them to other areas of the industry in the process. Oh, and customer feedback has led to UK cars getting a subtle ‘BYD’ badge on the back rather than the full ‘BUILD YOUR DREAMS’ script titillating those sat behind you in traffic. Phew.

The Seal is a solid entry in the EV saloon market, and pending official pricing, we’re pretty impressed by it. If not wholly bowled over. The Tesla Model 3 has made itself almost annoyingly ubiquitous while the Hyundai Ioniq 6 and Polestar 2 represent well-priced, individually styled alternatives and the BMW i4 staunchly defends driving thrills.

While nowhere near as packed as the EV crossover marketplace, the plug-in saloon pack are much more talented, and BYD will have to rely on competitive pricing for the Seal to have a proper USP and truly get its rivals in a flap. However smartly styled it is or deftly it drives, there’s no surfeit of charm or character to win your heart; this’ll be a head-based buy.

Driving

What is it like to drive?

The fundamentals of the BYD Seal are good, its trick battery technology helping lower its centre of gravity while there’s a ’50:50 golden axle load ratio’ according to the bumf. Perfect weight distribution, in other words. Handy when there’s an unavoidably chunky weight figure to keep in check: 2055kg for the RWD car, 2185kg if you’ve gone AWD.

And the Seal does a very admirable job of keeping that weight under control, in fact, handling pretty deftly with light, reactive steering and predictable responses, even without the helping hand of any rear-wheel steer. The focus has been on comfort and safety – the latter being ‘the ultimate luxury’ in an EV, according to the engineering team – making it perhaps helpful that the Bavarian countryside enjoyed some particularly torrential rain for the entirety of our test drive.

Uh oh, how did it cope with that?

Perhaps it should be no surprise that a Seal thrives in wet conditions, and it felt pretty surefooted, both RWD and AWD cars putting their power down cleanly without ever notably upsetting the traction control. What the car never exhibited was any great thrills: it goes round corners very capably, just with no obvious verve. For the savvy company car buyers it’s likely to entice, that’s probably just fine. Enthusiasts might need to look elsewhere.

Its performance is punchy if lacking the head-snapping acceleration of some rivals – a good thing, perhaps – while the RWD car doesn’t feel a whole lot slower than its sprightlier sibling. Allied to its longer ranger figure, it’s probably the one to have given the Seal isn’t billing itself as a performance car in the first place, and its passive suspension feels as comfy as the AWD’s active setup. Both are uncommonly refined and the only thing to break their library-esque atmosphere is their cloying low-speed tinkle.

Say what?

Below 20mph, as you trundle through town, passers-by are alerted to your presence by either a growing, almost ghoulish warble (one which was slightly out of sync with the throttle in our test car) or via BYD’s own tinkly tune that’s not unlike an ice cream van on a summer’s day. The stares of pedestrians are very real, not least because you don’t have a bootful of Fabs and Twisters to appease them. It’s an either/or situation, too – this isn’t the car for a silent getaway.

Even more intrusive, though, is its suite of active safety systems. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ we hear you say, ‘you always moan about these things’. But almost every rival implements them with more class, or certainly makes them simpler to turn off than the cumbersome trawl through sub-menus required here.

This is all because of laws ‘n’ stuff, isn’t it?

It’s what standardised safety tests command these days, of course, and BYD has little choice but to bolt this stuff onto every car for a strong rating. But the Seal’s steering wheel was writhing in our hands on perfectly straight pieces of road as it tried to adhere to lines that didn’t exist. And this after we’d apparently disabled lane-keep assist (there’s an ‘emergency’ lane-keep assist that’s harder to disengage). As regulations dictate, everything turns itself back on each time you start the car, too.

Implemented well, some electronic helpers are golden – driving a car without parking sensors or blind-spot monitoring now feels as exposing as cycling without a helmet. But very few of the Seal’s systems are so polite in their assistance.

Interior

What is it like on the inside?

The interior of the Seal is also a tale of two halves. For the most part, it’s very impressive. The quality is strong and the materials good, a mix of leather, suede and ambient lighting all setting a nice tone. Alright, the disco lighting around your feet may seem a bit much, but all the major touchpoints feel good, the crystal-effect gear selector especially nice.

There’s an absence of steering wheel paddles – you’ve only one brake regen setting, and you’ll find it tucked away in the touchscreen. It’s a shame there’s no one-pedal option nor a handful of regen strengths like some of its rivals major in. It certainly robs the Seal of some engagement.

The touchscreen definitely takes some learning. Being able to rotate it through 90 degrees is a welcome gimmick, catering to different tastes neatly, but the screen is a little too big to be able to quickly flick your eyes at on the move, while negotiating its menus to change the regen or steering weight – not to mention the seat heating and climate control – isn’t the simplest task. You’ll do well to have a passenger on co-driving duties.

There are also a few clumsy details that betray BYD’s relative youth, too, its first car launching in 2008. For all the multitude of ambient lighting options and choice of two different indicator clicks (!), the automatic wipers rarely flap with quite the right timing. When the auto lights flicker on through a tunnel or a bunch of trees, the touchscreen dims to the point you’ll struggle to decipher its contents.

And while having two wireless charging trays up front is great, each time either of the phones within even slightly shifts – through a higher speed corner, for instance – it reactivates the charging, which again dims the touchscreen as a ‘charging active’ alert appears, which isn’t especially useful if it’s at a junction where you’re needing the nav.

None of those are major issues in isolation, rather a small handful of irritants that more established rivals don’t commit. Enough to occasionally break the calm of its otherwise exemplary refinement.

In better news, there’s decent room in the back for fully grown folk (despite the still high floor) and that glass roof does work wonders for the ambience. Boot space is 400 litres in the back, with an additional 53 in its frunk.

Buying

What should I be paying?

There’s no conclusive story to tell here in lieu of UK pricing being announced (it’s mere days away, as we write). Assuming the Seal starts in the mid-forties, where it absolutely must if it’s to look competitive against the Tesla Model 3, then you do at least get a heck of a lot as standard.

Every car gets 19in alloys, the huge pano roof, a premium Dynaudio stereo and – yay! – all those active safety systems. There’s a strong warranty too – six years/150,000km for the whole car, eight years/200,000km for the battery – while the range figures are competitive. Next year will see the launch of a 61kWh entry-level car that’ll hopefully sit around forty grand.

The RWD car comes solely in Design trim, the AWD in Excellence – but those names feel arbitrary as, beyond its additional motor, the latter’s only extras are its ‘semi-active’ suspension and head-up display. Both are things you can probably live without.

Can the Seal manage to stand out alongside the Model 3, Ioniq 6, Polestar 2 and BMW i4? It’s a more talented and arresting bunch than BYD’s other cars have to battle, but a blockbuster low price (or some aggressive finance deals) might just prove enough to arm it usefully against them. We shall see.