Look out Tesla, there’s an electric brand that’s dominating global sales and is already making an impact in New Zealand.

Chinese brand BYD (which stands for Build Your Dreams … yes really), launched in New Zealand in July with the Atto 3 and has already shot to second place for new EV sales here in September with 221 cars registered while the other major Chinese player, MG, seeing 178 ZS vehicles sold. 

While the Tesla Model Y was the top-selling vehicle for September with 1502 units registered, globally the American EV maker is finding it’s being superseded by BYD. For the third quarter of this year, BYD sold  538,704 units, 56.7 percent more than Tesla delivered.

Tesla blamed car transportation issues for the delivery of 344,000 vehicles by September 30. But BYD is now pushing into more markets, including the UK and Europe.

Back here in New Zealand, the new player in the EV market has impressed with its price point of $52,990 for the standard BYD Atto3 (with a range of 345km) and tops out at $57,990 for the extended range.

Both variants are also eligible for the current full EV clean car rebate of $8625. 

The Atto 3 is also comprehensively covered by a 6-year / 150,000km new vehicle warranty with 6-year roadside assistance package.

Now with a tow capacity of 750kg braked and 75kg maximum tongue download, a new colour option plus service plans increase the attractiveness of the product. 

The compact SUV Atto 3 is 4.4m long with a 2720mm wheelbase and offers 440L of luggage space and weighs 1680kg.

BYD had 500 customer registrations, with many more presales to fill this month as shipments continue to arrive.

What makes the BYD different from its competitors is that in 2020 it introduced its new bladed battery cell.  It uses lithium-ion phosphate (LFP) instead of nickel manganese cobalt (NMC). While most batteries have multiple modules, the Blade stacks all the cells together.

So, what is the BYD Atto 3 like? 

Let’s start at the exterior. It’s a good-looking SUV, with a European feel to it. As you get closer you’ll notice the rear badging: Build Your Dreams across the boot. 

Interestingly in Australia, some of the journalists called it by its official name, Build Your Dreams, but New Zealand’s distributor, Ateco, has smartly chosen to use the acronym BYD (which also had my son, Henry, joking that it stands for “Bring Your Drink”).

Ateco also plans to make a New Zealand-specific model with just BYD badging on the rear.

And what is all the fuss about the BYD Atto 3’s quirky interior design?

The interior design is the most polarising and if you plan to buy one, I suggest you skip this bit. The cabin is themed around exercise/athleticism: ventilation outlets that look like dumbbells, a centre console trim that echoes a treadmill, and dashboard finish that looks like muscle and sinew. Yeah, muscle. 

The cabin’s party piece is a 12.8-inch screen that can be in landscape or portrait orientation at the touch of a button. I had fun demonstrating this by saying “I”m a BYD”, pushing a button on the steering wheel so it moved to vertical, and saying, “And now I’m a Tesla!”. Hey, I found it funny.

There is also the quirky aspect that the door bins are enclosed by strings of red elastic pulled tight enough that they can be played like a guitar. Fun at the beginning but if your rear passengers continuously ‘played’ them then you could find it annoying.

There’s no Apple CarPlay or Android Auto connectivity just yet, although BYD says they will be made available via an over-the-air update soon.

AutoMuse had the Atto 3 extended range for seven days and what impressed me the most about the electric compact SUV was the range with a real-life 420km thanks to the battery technology. 

I didn’t need to use regenerative braking to top up the range, and I didn’t even need to charge it once, which was impressive as I did a combination of daily commutes on the motorway, heading to the countryside, and short journeys to my local supermarket, so a weekly drive that most Kiwis would experience. 

The motorway commute was 40 minutes twice a day (as a ‘chauffeur’ for my son to his new job) so I added a few kilometers to the BYD. While I was impressed with the overtaking on the motorway; it was sluggish moving from the on-ramp, with a bit of wiggling when I quickly moved lanes, probably down to the eco-tyres.  

But the overall handling and ride quality were good for this segment and price range in the EV category. This was down to the size of the Atto 3, with the suspension suited for the lumps and bumps regularly found on our roads, and those very aggressive speed bumps now found in many suburban main routes.

So, who is going to buy the BYD Atto 3? It will appeal to a younger audience who aren’t fazed by the quirky interior design, while an MG ZS EV owner told me, after seeing the BYD, that she had also looked at buying this Chinese competitor but liked a more conservative design.