It is extremely easy to be very uninterested in the latest offering from the enormous Chinese car company BYD. Which stands, revoltingly, for Build Your Dreams. It is just five metres of car. Wallpaper paste with windscreen wipers. Yes, it’s made in a factory that’s bigger than San Francisco, and yes, every component apart from the tyres is made in-house, and I’m sure that’s very fascinating if you’re an accountant. But I’m not.
I had one for a whole week and after it was taken away, if you’d asked me to describe it, I would have said, “It was car-shaped.” But we’ve been here before. Back in the Seventies, various companies we’d never heard of such as Datsun and Toyota started sending us car-shaped cars from their factories in Japan. And we scoffed at them because they were just so appallingly dull.
But they had a trick up their sleeves. Unlike our Fords and Austins, these car-shaped cars started. Even on a frosty morning, their crummy little engines would spring into life after only the tiniest prod from the starter motor. And they never went wrong.
And lo, it came to pass that for vast numbers of motorists this kind of thing mattered. We’d been led to believe that breakdowns were inevitable because cars were complex things, but here was Datsun showing us that this needn’t be the case. And so we bought them in huge numbers.
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Today all cars are reliable, so the Chinese can’t use that as bait to entice us into their showrooms. Instead they’ve come up with a different approach. Price. We’ve been led to believe, especially in recent years, that cars are bound to be expensive because they’re very technical. But now we have the car you see in the pictures and prices start at a scarcely believable £34,990 for the Boost trim. For a large plug-in hybrid it’s extraordinary value for money. That’s about four grand less than Skoda charges for a similarly sized Superb Estate.
It’s called the Seal 6, which is the name of the special forces unit that killed Osama bin Laden. I’ve no idea why the Chinese would name a medium-sized estate car after this elite fighting unit. Maybe they didn’t realise. This sort of thing can happen. Remember that unfortunate Swiss start-up that built a car and called it the Growler?
So anyway, the Seal 6. Why’s it so cheap? Well, there’s nothing you can put your finger on. It has seats and a touchscreen and you can unlock the doors by tapping your phone on the door mirror and so on. But there is a sense that every component was built as cheaply as possible. The fabrics. The springing in the seats. The way the tyres sound and feel as you drive along. It all feels desperately, Vauxhall Vectrishinly, uninspiring. But so did those Datsuns back in ’75.
It also feels slow. Most plug-in hybrids use the petrol engine and the electric motor to propel you along the road, but in the Seal 6 the engine is mostly there to charge the batteries. Only when you put your foot hard down does it connect itself to the wheels and work in unison with the motor.
When the two are working together in the Comfort Lite version I tested you have 209 brake horsepowers, which is enough to get you from 0 to 62mph in about a week. If you want to take longer than that, there’s a less powerful alternative. On electrical power only, the Comfort Lite has a claimed range of 62 miles. And there are some tax benefits. I don’t know what they are and I don’t care because I’m a car journalist, not, as I mentioned earlier, an accountant.
As a result of that, I can report that on the excitement-o-meter, the Seal 6 is about as far removed from the Seal 6 special forces unit as it’s possible to imagine. It is wilfully dull to drive. There’s no joy at all, and if you try to enliven proceedings with a bit of extra speed, it becomes wayward and bolshie.
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I get that. If you want a new car and are strapped for cash, then the Seal 6 is fine. It won’t explode, it won’t crash every time you go round a corner, it won’t dissolve in heavy rain and it does have a very big boot. So it’s like a £5.50 bottle of wine. For most people it’s fine.
But it does have one issue that drove me up the wall: a little camera on one of the A-pillars around the windscreen that looks at your face as you drive and then sends messages to the dashboard if it thinks you’re not paying enough attention to the job in hand.
I suspect in China this might be necessary because the last time I was there I was told that every driver is photographed and videoed constantly on the motorways because so many of them alleviate the boredom on a long journey by, how can I put this, pleasuring themselves.
Is this true? I asked my air fryer for more information on the matter and it stated categorically that there had only been one case. My Chinese AI system says the same. But I can only report on what I was told.
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Is that why there’s a camera on board? And what message is flashed up if you do, you know, have a moment of “me” time? I don’t know. And I didn’t try to find out. What I did discover is that if you take your eyes off the road for even a moment, you get a bong and a written instruction telling you to correct your behaviour. And here’s where it gets really annoying. If you look down to read the warning message, you are then told to pay attention to the road.
I’m sure this can all be disabled but God knows how many warnings you’d get if you tried to do that while you were driving along. I was even reprimanded for looking left and right as I approached a junction. In the end I parked it after 13 miles and used the Ineos Grenadier instead.
So, there you are. A plug-in hybrid that captures the essence of the Datsun Sunny and the Vauxhall Vectra and serves it up on a nanny-state bed of bossing and bullying. Not my cup of tea, then, on every single level. But it costs from only £34,990. So it could very well be yours.
