BYD Seal review: The Chinese brand will sit swimmingly on Irish roads

A couple of weeks back we ran the rule over the new – to Ireland, at least – BYD Dolphin from the Chinese company. We weren’t that impressed, really, but this week we have an ocean-going critter of an entirely different colour – the BYD Seal and it scored rather more highly on our register.

Until six months ago, BYD was the biggest Chinese car maker you’ve never heard of and now that it has come under the wing of MDL (Motor Distributors Ltd., the importer of Mercedes into Ireland) it has, all of a sudden, sprung to the fore of the Irish car buying public’s consciousness.

Two early models, the ATTO 3 and the Dolphin, were the initial offerings from BYD having been conceived by a bunch of European engineers and designers hired especially to explode the company into the consciousness of the consumer in this part of the world.

Clever, yet copyist, but best of all, cheap, the early BYDs found an instant audience looking for a value for money EV. But the introduction of the Seal moved things up a notch or ten. For BYD, this is what’s called a ‘halo’ product.

Good-looking, smart, high-tech and – you guessed it – cheap for what you’re getting, the Seal moves the company into a whole new world and a potential audience which has already succumbed to such as VW’s new ID.7, the Tesla 3, the BMW i4, and the Polestar 2. In industry terms, it has joined the D-Segment electric saloon car market.

That’s tough company no matter which way you size it up, but the Seal is a lot of car for the money and have no doubt it will make waves (er, sorry). It is by far the slickest thing we’ve seen from China yet and have no doubt that it will rattle a few established cages in the coming months and years.

Good looking in a low-slung sort of fashion, the design contains design elements of the Tesla 3 and the Ionic 6 from Hyundai, while you can also see things like Audi’s e-Tron GT or the Porsche Taycan have influenced the overall look. Combining the best-looking bits from a stable of cars of that class is not only admirable, but it makes good marketing sense as well.

It is also packed with the sort of tech that will leave punters intrigued – not to mention puzzled. I mean, if the Chinese can equip their cars to a fantastic level and bring it to the market at a startling price, then why can’t the Europeans do it too.

But it’s worth noting that this is not all just about Chinese expertise in copying others designs – or at least adapting them to their own benefit. This is actually quite a clever car from a number of vantage points.

The top cover of the battery pack, for example, is actually the car’s floor which means that the 82-kWh lithium-ion phosphate battery is actually a structural element of the Seal. That platform – called the e-Platform 3.0 – is a scalable one and is actually the same as that used on both the ATTO 3 and the Dolphin, but with startlingly different results.

By using it, BYD has given the Seal excellent torsional rigidity and a lower floor allows for an interior packaging concept that any European manufacturer would be proud of. There are two versions on offer – the lesser being the ‘Design’ version which has a 308 bhp motor with an impressive range of 570 km and a 0-100 km/h time of 5.9 seconds.

The one we tried was the ‘Excellence’ version which comes with a 523 bhp motor and a 3.8 second 0-100 km/h time which puts it into supercar territory. Indeed. BYD are so proud of the car’s prowess that it is illustrated in chrome on the boot lid as the BYD Seal 3.8S.

The range is 520 km and, by any normal measure, the stats of this car will make it stand out to the buying public as much as the price will. That the car is also a four-wheel drive beast, is another feather in its cap and another reason it will appeal.

On the road it is not the best car I’ve ever driven, but it’s damn good; it might not be up to Porsche, Mercedes, Audi, BMW or Tesla standards, but it is far better than I expected and cost nothing like as much as those.

The power delivery is punchy, while the steering is direct and the rack quick. There is a definable sense of agility here and that’s not something you might have reasonably expected. On top of that there are several drive modes to choose from, but to be honest, I stuck with ‘sport’ and ‘normal’ and found both delivered sprightly performance with little drama.

I did find the brakes to be a tad on the unresponsive and vague side – it was like they were slow to warm up, or something – but once you got the feel for them, they certainly provided excellent stopping power.

There was much to admire here, but there two specific things I did not like. First was the fact that the indicator stalk was on the right side of the steering column. I have not seen such a layout since the Japanese first made an impression here back in the ‘70’s’ and ‘80’s’ and it did not work well now, just as it did not then.

The net effect of this was that any time you intuitively went to indicate left or right, you activated the wipers. This was desperately annoying and I don’t know did the designers do it for fun or devilment, but it’s something they are going to have to change.

The second was that the otherwise smartly designed and executed interior layout came in a colour known to Airfix modellers as ‘duck-egg blue.’ It was awful and I’d suggest to anyone ordering the car to avoid this particular blindingly bright shade.

In terms of driver tech, everything is orchestrated through the 15.6” touchscreen whose party piece is that it can switch from portrait to landscape mode at the touch of a button. This is actually a bit of a swizz, because in portrait mode it gets too close to the rearview mirror, so you end up with the landscape setting most of the time anyway.

Elsewhere, the interior actually feels and looks premium throughout without being cheesy or different just for the sake of it. Everything was screwed together nicely and the trim was good to live with and touch.

For all that, there are tacky elements in here – the stitched upholstery, for example and the ‘BYD’ embossed head rests, being prime amongst them. Passenger space is excellent, although rear headroom is a little tight due to the plunging roofline.

Boot space is good and there is a small ‘frunk’ under the bonnet for tidying up the charging cables and stuff like that.

All told then, this is by far the best BYD we’ve yet driven and it looks like it is a signpost car for the brand, because undoubtedly the company is only going to get smarter and better at what they’re doing.

For a premium product at this price – and an electric to boot – the Seal is a definite winner. Expect to see a lot of them in the coming months and years. They’re here to stay.