BYD’s new electric sedan is posh, fast, and sometimes quirky

2023 BYD Seal Performance

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Launched: September 2023 – Price: S$259,888 with COE (Nov 2023)
Four-door, medium sedan, five seats
530hp, dual-motor electric drive, 18.2kWh/100km, 520km range

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PROS
Tidy, Clean styling
Quiet on the move
Good dynamic handling

CONS
Manually fitted sunshade
FIt and finish still not perfect

SINGAPORE

Plenty has already been said about the BYD Seal. From the local product launch news in Singapore to the drive in China, CarBuyer Singapore has given plenty of background to the flag bearer of Chinese high performance electric vehicles.

So now we bring you the on-the-roads around Singapore experience with the BYD Seal. It’s a medium-large kind of sedan, somewhat similar in size to the Kia Stinger. But forget about petrol, this one is all-electric.

The Seal is sold in Singapore in three vastly different motor variants. The entry version is the Dynamic, with a single electric motor driving the rear wheels and an output of 150 kilowatts, or 203 horsepower.  The Premium raises this to 230 kilowatts, or 313 horsepower.

The BYD Seal Performance, driven here, has 390 kilowatts or 530 horsepower, dual motors and all-wheel drive. On paper, this sounds like a fantastically quick car but the driving experience will reveal it all when we get to it.

Styling is nicely sleek and reasonably understated. It’s still not as bulbous and featureless as a Tesla Model 3, but also not as in-your-face as an Audi RS e-tron GT. There’s a distinct BYD style to it, and it is clearly from the same family as the BYD Atto 3. Despite the swooping rear window that makes it look like a liftback, it’s a full-on sedan in that the rear window doesn’t open along with the boot like in the Skoda Superb.

Retracting door handles, like those found in the Mercedes-EQ EQE and the rest of the Mercedes electric vehicle family, are fitted to the Seal. It certainly adds a level of poshness to the car when the handles extend upon unlocking the car and the puddle lights tucked beneath the wing mirrors illuminate the sides of the car after sundown.

Inside, it’s not as radically styled as the Atto 3 before it. Instead, the suede dashboard, huge 15.6-inch rotating touchscreen, and tidy centre console layout gives the car a very posh vibe.

The rear bench is spacious, helped by the totally flat floor which even the new BMW i5 cannot match for legroom. The fit and finish is good but not yet of Audi standards. 

As you would expect from a new EV, the car is fully packed with active safety features. Front collision assist, lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control as the main highlights, then there’s the ventilated front seats, 12-speaker Dynaudio sound system and Smart Voice Assist. It’s similar to what many of the continental luxury cars already have but the BYD lady’s voice is actually very natural and sometimes you forget that it’s just an A.I. synthesised voice.

There’s a quirky bit of equipment overhead. The ceiling is a full piece of insulated, dark tinted glass like you would find in the Tesla Model Y, but it doesn’t have any option to mechanically cover it completely. So if your passengers do not fancy looking at the sky, you go to the boot, and take out two fabric sunshades, and manually clip them into place from inside the car. It’s all a bit fiddly, but still a hundred times easier than clipping the roof onto a Lotus Elise.

The Seal is a totally silent car when on the move. The absence of synthesised spaceship whooshing noises is actually quite a confident step, considering how Mercedes and BMW have been trumpeting the sounds that their cars make through the speakers.

This makes the forward punch of the car even more exhilarating as the acceleration takes place in total silence except for the sound of the tyres on the road. Like all modern EVs the batteries make for a lot of weight and this is a pretty heavy car. So despite having more power and more wheels driven than a Porsche 911 S/T, it’s a tiny bit slower in the century sprint.

Without any engine capacity to talk about, the car instead has a ‘3.8s’ badge on the rump, which is the time it needs to reach 100km/h from a standing start.

Cornering performance is only limited by the car’s factory-fitted Continental EcoContact tyres, as BYD’s proprietary torque-vectoring software allows it to really handle like a large sportscar. Like the Polestar 2, it’s very much a stealthy kind of car in that it doesn’t overly draw attention to itself but is really capable of punching ahead in traffic with almost as much speed as a supercar but without the drama.

Its real-world power economy is right about where BYD claims it to be and more than 500km per charge is accessible in daily driving. 

The base specification BYD Seal may have less than half the horsepower of the Performance Variant, but still makes a good account for itself with a claimed range of 460km from the smaller 61.4kWh battery. It’s not all that slow either, with a 0 to 100km/h sprint time of 7.5 seconds. You save almost S$40k compared to this, the full-fat, full-power version. 

But, the full-fat version is as comfortable as a Toyota Camry Hybrid, faster in a straight line than a Porsche 718 Cayman GTS, and has a sticker price similar to a Toyota Harrier Hybrid. 

BYD Seal Performance 

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