PERFORMANCE REVIEW
Budget-friendly brand BYD has a whole new audience in mind with the Seal Performance sedan
It’s fair to say that BYD has taken New Zealand by something approaching a storm in the last couple of years. Partly thanks to offering great EV technology at Clean Car Discount (CCD) prices, but also partly because the cars are of consistently impressive quality.
The CCD is gone, but BYD is surely in a better position than most electric brands to keep that momentum going. Move a little upmarket even.
Enter the Seal sedan. There are a couple of models that could have made the CCD cut: the $62,990 Dynamic RWD and even the mid-range $72,990 Premium AWD. But not the car you see here: the $83,990 Performance AWD ($86,990 with the Shark Grey paint colour pictured).
Can any BYD car convincingly carry an $84k price tag? Well, yes. The Seal Premium is a compelling machine in many different ways.
It’s a sedan in an SUV market. But that’ll be a nice point of difference for some, and don’t forget sedans are actually still pretty popular in China and Europe. More to the point, the Tesla Model 3 is a sedan and BYD has been very clear about this being a direct response. You also have to put the Hyundai Ioniq 6, Polestar 2 (okay, that one has a bit of hatch at the back) and even BMW i4 into the frame.
The BYD could stand on looks (apologies to Porsche Taycan perhaps) and performance alone. Zero to 100km/h in 3.8 seconds is faster than many supercars of 20 years ago and it’s delivered in that effortless (if initially alarming for passengers) EV way. It’s even written on the bootlid: “3.8S”.
While we’re on the performance thing, this Seal does have the chassis to cope. The steering is not brilliantly communicative (you can weight it up more with the Sport setting), but it’s accurate; and the Performance is astonishingly grippy in corners, thanks partly to the fast-acting AWD system.
Some of the credit must go to the strength of the platform: Seal is the first BYD to be built around Cell To Body (CTB) technology, which means the Blade battery is actually part of the structure of the car – not just inserted into it.
The Seal also has something called intelligent Torque Adaption Control (iTAC), which is essentially a very advanced form of torque vectoring: rather than reducing power to restore stability, it can rapidly shift power around (or even apply more of it) to maintain momentum.
We’d love to tell you more, but after a hurried handover we failed to realise you actually need to activate iTAC in the infotainment menu, leading to a “duh” moment as our test time drew to an end. Why it wouldn’t be active all the time we don’t know, but our bad; we’ve been promised some time to explore this tech (a racetrack was mentioned).
But when all the excitement is done, the Seal Performance does luxury pretty well too. The cabin design will be familiar to those who own a Dolphin or Atto 3, but it’s all done in the best possible taste, with a quality feel to the materials and really impressive sports-style front seats – which is a BYD thing because the chairs in the Dolphin and Atto 3 are also really good.
There’s a bewildering number of settings in the infotainment menu (right down to telling the climate control just how you’d like your cool air delivered, in excruciating detail) and the usual mini-annoyances, like the overspeed warning that you have to switch off manually every time you get in the car, unless you are planning to never hit that 30km/h urban limit. But a lot of this is just modern EV stuff.
Only brand snobs could deny that the Seal Performance is a convincing rival to not just the likes of the Tesla Model 3, but also much more expensive premium-brand European sedans. And 0-100km/h in 3.8sec does settle a lot of arguments.