BYD Atto 3 SC2E Extended (2022-2025)

I have bought the car for 1+ years. Overall no major issues. I have been enjoying the driving experience of electric car. The range 480km is quite accurate. I have received regular software updates that fixes up some minor issues such as over sensitive collision warning and lane departure. Servicing has been economical compared to internal… Read more

combustion. Fuel economy is fabulous (as I charge overnight using the mid night rate). Front tyre has worn out after about 35000 km mileage. Wiper has already worn off. Overall a good experience.

Our Atto 3 is great electric vehicle, lots of gismos, good range, drives well and is for the price a very worthwhile purchase. Well until three months ago. The car developed a knock in the steering. I took it to MyCar the BYD servicing agency and they said it had a knock in its steering that BYD would need to repair it. Despite being two years… Read more

into its 5 year warranty I was charged $90 for being told what I knew already. I phoned the local BYD service centre. They told me it was probably an issue with a driving shaft, an apparently not uncommon fault. They advised me to not drive the vehicle and then offered me the next available repair slot which was 10 weeks away. Could I have a loan car in the meantime? No, they didn't have any. A hire car, no they didn't under the terms of the warranty provide that service.

Great car, sh*t back up service, buy anything but a

In 2022 We waited until we had the combo of under $50k and over 450kms of range (plenty around now with much lower cost and higher range but back then the ATTO3 was it). Needed to fit a family of four and luggage comfortably as well. I drive a Tesla and other EV’s for work, so had plenty of benchmarks, and the Tesla (model 3 standard) is the… Read more

standout as a drivers car. Fast, comfortable, amazing tech, and these days, well built. But - $60k plus for a decent spec model and only 400k actual driving range on average, we looked at the newly launched ATTO3 that is more like a small/medium SUV, a bit more family friendly.

Wasn’t expecting too much from this quirky Chinese car, but was pleasantly surprised. Range around town was about 450kms, and anywhere from 300-400 on the motorway depending what’s in the car and never had any issues with charger compatability (except the known Tesla super charger issue). All other chargers work as expected. A recent trip from Sydney to Melbourne was hassle free and we stopped as many times to charge as we would have normally stopped for kids toilet breaks/coffee. I feel more rested getting out of this car after a long journey as well, with no buzzing engine noise for hours.

Living in a relatively hot country, the ability to open/close the large sunroof and have a sunblock blind is great - the Teslas fixed glass panel is a nightmare in the sun - have had to wait 5 mins to get in sometimes!

The suspension is softer then most very firm Aussie cars - but we saw this as a plus. No more rattling and bumping over potholes, the ride is comfortable. If you want the sports car experience, buy the Tesla.

The Batman tyres it came with are ok, but sometimes spin if you plant your foot before the traction control kicks in. I think they have changed the stock tyres now.

We’ve had no issues in the last few years, and it’s great that the OTA updates improve the car every so often. Servicing is much cheaper than a standard car.

The app is also useful - you can find the car, switch on heating/cooling, lock/unlock and drive the car without the keys. All the other tech is fun, we use a combo of Appleplay and the cars own system.

All in all, one of the best all round family cars we have ever bought, petrol/ diesel or otherwise.

Reccomended.

Poor quality and worst after sales service, warranty is on papaer only, not when it comes for claims! – Unreliable car, combined with very poor customer service. Do NOT trust these cars or their after sales service. I had this car over 18 months now, within couple of months, the plastic on the side of the seat cracked and broke. Called for warranty, they ignored me. Later they said take it to the service centre and they will glue it. Yes they said… Read more

they will glue it!!!! Can you believe it. [Content Removed] chinese made car. Do NOT trust. Now last week car stalled on the middle of the road, apparently power failure. Called BYD, they tell me they will tow the car, but after the mechanic inspection if it not covered by warranty, then I am liable for TOW charges and repairs. This is a 18 month old vehicle we are talking about. I am over this [Content Removed], I will soon be back to reliable Japanese cars with good warranty and after sales service. Please be aware of these cheap tactics of BYD.

BYD - good car, software not so good – Update Dec 2025: Just had my 40,000k service. When I bought the car they advised that the service costs for the compulsory annual service would be $200-$250 per year. The 20,000 service was $185 - all good. The 40,000 was suddenly $550. "we found the software updates were well out of date and have had to update them one by one as they have to be… Read more

done in sequence" Ok but when I picked it up from the service I asked why has the software not updated over the Air? No answer! So I asked BYD why. They said talk to your dealer!!! Wrote a bad review of the latest service and immediately got a phone call from the dealer. NOW they tell me that the updates over the air are not ALL the updates and the dealer has to do some of them using their diagnostic equipment which involves several hours! Really? Surly an update is an update! I have not had an over-air update for many months. Is there some sort of wrought going on like stop updating and give the dealers the chance to up their service revenue? More to the point this 40k update was done when the car mileage was 33k because BYD insists on 12 months or 40k whichever comes first. That means the gearbox oil and the brake fluid were all replaced 7000km before they needed to be. That is 12 months running for me. By 80,000 when the bill will be even higher they now tell me, the car is likely to be 14000km short of the 80000km! Apart from the environmental stupidity of replaceing fluids well before they need to be, it means that the service costs of this car may not be that different from the ICE car.

NB see Feb 25 update further down - certain issues discussed below have made me re-think the BYD. I like the car a lot but an issue with it (resolved by the dealer) unsettled me but actually the issue applies to maybe to any EV as discussed below.).

I bought this car for general use in retirement because I liked the interior, and understood that battery can be safely topped up to 100% from any start point. The fully charged range-estimate always tells me about 460km. For quite a time I thought this was about right but now I am sure this was never possible even if you just did town driving never over 30KPH! On an initial trip from Wellington to Napier it did 330km with 15% battery to spare (85% used) carrying 2 people and luggage but performance declined quite suddenly over the past 12 months and the trip-range became about 289km for 85% usage. The estimated future distance currently averages 29% overstated. Due to an issue with the 12 voly battery it became about 35% overstated even if you set it to Dynamic as opposed to Average usage. More on this in the Feb 25 Update further down. Initially I wrote this about the car: It is quiet although the reduction gears can be slightly noisy at low speeds sometimes. The original tyres are poor and look like they will last barely 30,000 km. I bought this car with 15000km on the clock, but maybe the first owner was fond of turning the steering when the car is stationary. I never do that and wear since I bought the car seems to be much less but the front tyres are due for replacement at 31,000 km. I was aware that the Batman tyres might be poor so it will be interesting to see how a different brand works out.

Handling on undulating roads is said to be an issue but our roads are more bumps than undulations, so I have not had this issue so far.

What I found is that there are a few niggles 1. The proximity warning for frontal objects does not work very well. This is said to be due to the camera position. A strange thing is that when I pull into my garage, I can stop a foot or two away from a frontal object without proximity warning, but when I get into the car next time and power up the proximity warnings fire up and beep away furiously until I have pretty well backed out of the garage. 2. The 360 overhead view is great but my curved drive confuses it so it cannot be relied upon to back out of certain situations. The combination of the 360 degree view and the reversing camera is fine for most backing. 3. Blind spot monitoring seems a bit slow but it might be that I just don't notice it soon enough. Nearest I have come to a smash was down to this. Not really important with cameras but it has poor visibility to the rear due to the back seat head rests (which I think can be removed but a bit of a pain) 4. If you pull into your garage and come to a stop then realise the garage door won't shut and you need to ease forward you may need to be super careful. Once you stop, taking your foot off the brake does not always mean the car will inch forward like my old automatic car would. To make it go forward sometimes one has to "flick" the accelerator. It has never happened but it feels like too much "flick" and you could possibly rear up and crash into whatever is in front of you. Reversing works ok; put it into reverse and take your foot off the brake and it will slowly reverse. Having said this, sometimes it does this ok going forwards and I can't figure out why. Might be just my car. 5. The doors are a little heavy for people my age (mid 70's). You get a workout opening the doors. 6. I have turned off as many of the warnings as I could, mostly the lane control settings. They seem inconsistent and a bit slow and tend to beep at the wrong time and not at other times when you think they might. They can be annoying but one does get used to them. Emergency lane control (as opposed to "normal" ) cannot be turned off permanently. 8. Disappointed in the rear view backing from a car park. I have never had a reversing camera and perhaps unrealistically expected to look more sideways up the road to see what was coming but the rear camera although very helpful when backing from an angled carpark, does not quite have the side view I had expected but I have become used to it. One time I did not see a car visually or on the camera which decided that, although I was moving backwards from a car park, it would go behind me anyway. Seems that the BYD has some system to cover this as the brakes jammed on and avoided me backing into the other car - a good save but I have no idea what setting covers this but if there is one do not turn it off! 9. The driver's screen uses a font that superman could not read. If you go over the speed limit a little speed Icon starts to flash. This Icon shows the speed limit which the car reads from road signs and this works pretty well. However, due to the Icon's size this is very ineffective. Even when not speeding, the speed shown inside the Icon is so small it is unreadable. Apart from the speedo, most of the detail on the driver screen is in a young person's font - about half size, notably the battery percentage and the speed limit Icon, and this is one of my major gripes! 10. The speedo is 4KPH too fast which means that at each speed limit everyone is trying to get into the boot. BYD service took me seriously on this but eventually told me that the BYD's do not have this problem and, as I was comparing to speed radar at school crossings etc these were probably wrong. Funny my Nissan reads correctly - so this problem is still with me as the service centre I very much doubt will believe me let alone fix it. Why can't users adjust the speedo to get it reading correctly? If the speed is nearly ten % fast is the Odometer also running 10% fast devaluing the car that must faster? 11. The main screen darkens when the lights are on. As we sometimes drive during the day with our lights on if conditions warrant it, the darkened screen becomes hard to read - I would prefer to never darken the screen! There seems to be no setting for this. Also, in bright sunlight, which is very common here, one cannot read even the fully lit screen but this I think is common to all cars with these screens. One can set the screen to Dark backgound or Light backgound or Automatic but so far none of these seems to handle all situations. 11. Give me manual buttons for the Aircon - far too dangerous mucking around on the unreadable-in- sunlight touch screen. Voice command usually tells me the Aircon is on already when it is not. Voice control does successfully speed up or slow down the fan. Possiby, once you have learned what commands DO control the aircon you could avoid the aircon issue. 12. Verbal commands work well enough when they work but at least 50% of the time I am told that my request was not understood - this needs a better repertoire. I mean why can't I ask what the time is since I can't read it on the screen! The Sat-Nav works on voice but if it finds more than one possible destination these come up on the big screen and you are asked which one you want. Trouble is that once again the font is so small one cannot see the list clearly enough so have to assume number 1 is the one you want - 75% of the time that will work but i have been sent off course several times. 13 The adaptive cruise control does maintain the set speed more or less ok if there is no car in front of you and possibly in stop-start traffic it would be useful but we don't have that much traffic here and it sometimes does things like slow down when a car in front of you brakes even when it is a very long way ahead of you. Unexpected braking annoyingly happens if a car in front pulls to the centre to turn right and you can see there is enough room to pass on the inside (left side) and normally you would not assume the need to brake let alone quite forcibly! Not sure how I have not been rammed from behind due to this. 14.The auto-drive comes on only when you turn on the cruise control. I am used to that now but I would like to be able to turn on this feature without cruise control. It seems to work quite well and it would be handy if you had a drink and maybe should not be driving or are a bit tired! It takes a bit of getting used to but once you just accept it then, for the most part it steers quite well albeit a little vigourously. 15. The warnings about speed limits being exceeded come to life only when navigation is turned on. It is random about speed camera warnings. I would prefer to be able to activate the same audible speed warning on demand . Anyway, it is unworkable when the speedo is reading fast! 15. The slow charge works just fine for us. Normally we recharge at 70% battery and it is done by morning. Per the car manual we drop down to 20% once a month and that means 35 hours charging but it is not an issue being retired. My power bill increased way less than my monthly petrol bill but of course, we have .7 cents a kilometre road user charges which means the gap to petrol with electricity at just under 24 cents per KW has vanished. I have recently done a detailed check on the cost per KM and sadly find that at current petrol prices it would be cheaper to run a petrol car at 6.5 litres/100 or less.

Update Feb 2025: recently I found that if I leave the car unused for a day the motor-battery discharges by 2-4%. Unfortunately I did not log the first 18 months of battery performance in detail but it seems strange that over that period I never noticed this loss. I called the service people who checked with BYD and BYD advised that the expectation is that the motor-battery will "normally" discharge by 2% per day when unused! The local service people seemed totally confused in that they told me that the 12volt battery updates the motor battery every 20 minutes. Now that beggars belief. I am pretty sure/know it is the other way around but they insisted! I understand that the 12v battery is running the electonics even when the car is turned off, (see James May's famous video with his Tesla battery going flat). However I have found that when the car is turned off a pump continued to run and in fact it never stopped. You could feel fuid flowing through a rubber pipe that connects to the Motor but no fluid is passing into the radiator so what was this pump doing? The pump, plus being connected to the internet and running a few other functions, uses at least 2% of a 60KWH battery in about 12 hours! In a month at 2% per day you have lost 60% of one charge, maybe a loss of something like 180KM of travel which for us is about a weeks tootling around the city and on our monthy usage amounts to a 25% increase in electricity used. If you had a hole in your IC car's petrol tank dripping away 2% per day of your petrol you would not be happy! I have noticed that charging appeared to have slowed down, maybe this "leak" is the reason. Also, for the period from January to February 2025 I have averaged 3.4km per % of battery. But I have owned the car since November 2023 and for the first 6 months I got 4.4 km per % of charge, ie a decline in efficiency of 35% in about 12 months. I thought this must be the leak effect but thought it to be way too big a decline for the leak to be the full reason. If I were to start at 100% and draw down to 15% = 85% I will now get 340*85% = 289km of realistic range which would no longer be enough for the 360km Wellington to Napier trip mentioned above. Note that 3.4km per % is mostly around town, it might possibly be 2km per % on a hilly trip giving a trip-range of only 200km using 100% of the charge. So, by the end of February 2025 was I happy with my BYD? - Not really, the range remaining forcasts are a joke, the battery leak was expensive and the range was now nowhere near the 420 km odd that the car seemed to have at the start let alone the 480 km that the car claims for a full charge. In addition when the service manager of the dealer can't even understand the way the batteries are managed and a worrying "it is normal" from BYD concerning the leak then one starts to worry about trying to activate any warrenties which means unrelaxed ownership of this car. Update April 2025: Once I found the never-stopping pump, the agent was forced to admit that it was "Not Normal" as previously claimed and took the car for testing. Long story short, BYD came back and said that the 12volt battery was faulty. I have to say I did not believe them since I had had the battery tested by an auto electrician suspecting this could be an issue and it was prounced just fine. I was dubius that a pump would run like that just because the 12 volt battery was faulty but long story short, a new battery DID fix the leaking motor-battery and the pump stopped. Has my range returned? Apparently not fully. It is somewhat restored and now averages 3.6 km per % giving a maximum if you are silly enough to risk it of 360km, realisticall only 80% or 360! There was no charge for the new battery. I have since heard that failure of this battery is not uncomon which is odd given BYD make batteries first and formost.

In summary; the car seems well built and the paint seems good. Being a newish car maker I was concerned if the car was as well rust-protected as current Japanese cars and I was told it is rust protected inside. "Galvanised" they said which is suspicious, and I have heard of some rust being found on crashed BYD's - Jury out on this one. The significant issue which BYD could easily fix is the small font on the driver's screen and the navigation choices. Also the unreadability of the big screen especially the access to the airconditioning might also be improved by a software change to make the air-con icon visible even in sunlight (it currently vanishes completely in sunlight). To my mind the software generally promises more than it delivers as discussed above. Possibly most car software has these issues, I am not sure. Would I buy a BYD again? April 2025: After the "normal verdict and my service appointment was cancelled, my answer in February to that question was "No" due to what I now think are significant issues with service support and that probably applies for any electric car. Being told that battery leakage like I had is "Expected and Normal" was totally disconcerting. I realise now, that the if your issue is dismissed as "Normal", there is no really well established benchmark such as you will find with ICE cars that allows you to more confidently dispute this verdict. Once they say it is normal and wont even book a service check then your only remedy is the courts. I think the motor-battery warranty is probably not worth the paper it is written on since, unless there is catestrophic failure, you may find your decline is claimed to be "normal" - but what is really normal decline for these batteries! The potential warranty issues should things go wrong are a negative for me now. However I am still unlikely to go back to petrol. The BYD would still be on my shopping list given they did fix the leakage issue eventually but I am much more aware of how vulnerable EV owners are to being left high and dry on an issue and the warranty wording will be very important next time.