BYD Seal Long Term Review

So, here we are, one month in and I’ve already completed around 3,500 miles (I know, I drive a lot). It’s been a busy month of big road trips and long treks to different filming days around the UK.

One thing that slightly bugs me about the Seal is how you have to calculate the efficiency. Here in the UK we tend to go by ‘miles per kWh’. Sometimes in Europe it’ll be ‘kWh per 100km’ which I’m now pretty good at roughly converting those numbers in my head. But BYD has decided to keep me on my toes with ‘kWh per 100miles’. Back to the converter website I go!

Right, country roads and around town - I’ve been getting around 4.3 miles per kWh. I mean, that’s not bad going at all, is it? Similar to what our editor, Vicky, got in her ID.7 (another Seal rival, of course) long termer. Mind you, there is a heat wave currently in the UK, so that efficiency is in hot temperatures - but it also means that I’ve been full blasting the air con while also cooling my bum with the ventilated seats.

As for the motorway stuff, I've seem a much lower efficiency of 3.1 miles per kWh. Less ideal but also very similar to what you get in a lot of other EVs when you're cruising on the motorway. The Seal does come with a heat pump as standard (in both trims of this car) so I can only hope it behaves just as well when it starts getting colder.

*pulls out calculator*

With it’s 82.5kWh battery, these are the real world numbers you can expect during peak summertime: In town and on slower rural roads country - 354 miles (that’s crazy, that’s more than the WLTP of this AWD version. That’s actually the WLTP number of the single motor ‘design’ trim, but then we are talking about the range you get when you're in the slower ebb-and-flow away from the motorway, when electric cars tend to be at their most efficient!

Motorway driving? I'm seeing 255 miles real-world range from the BYD Seal. Yeh, bang on. Just last week I did a trip up to Wales which was a 240 mile trip, pretty much all motorway and finishing on country roads and I arrived in central Wales with 40 miles left in the car. Not too shabby, at all. 

The road trip to Wales was a bloody long one but surprisingly comfortable. Ask me to do a 5 hour drive and I normally will have to hop out the car at some point to stretch my legs and get the feeling back into my numb bum. Not this time: my bum remained very much un-numb! I connected to my Apple CarPlay (which sometimes doesn’t connect instantly so you have to go through the menus to trigger the connection, which is really annoying) and away I went. Music blaring and terrible singing. The sound system is pretty decent, there are 12 Dynaudio speakers dotted around the vehicle and they sound perfectly fine. I prefer a bit more bass and a bit les ‘tinny’ but it does the job.