BYD Seal (2023-2026)

I’ve owned my BYD Seal Performance for almost 18 months, and overall don’t regret buying it. It looks good, is moderately comfortable, drives beautifully, accelerates like a bat out of hell, handles and brakes well, and has a reasonable battery range of ~ 560km. So why only three stars? Because the electronics were clearly designed by… Read more

unbelievable geeks who don’t give a toss about the people who have to use their product; the scheduled service software updates or the rare Over The Air updates haven’t fixed any of the problems, or done anything else good that I’m aware of; and because the BYD service and support in Australia is a sorry and virtually useless joke.

Where to start? The biggest and most dangerous problem is with the Blind Spot Warning system - the flashing yellow warning lights in your rear mirrors if there’s anything approaching on either side from behind. It mysteriously and capriciously switches itself off every one, two or three days. For no apparent reason. And that’s dangerous if you’ve been relying on the system before lane changing. Easy enough to fix once you notice it’s not working: you just go into Settings and switch it on again - for the fiftieth time. Also the Lane Keeping Assist switches itself on and off for no apparent reason, even when travelling on highways with terrific lane markings. So you can’t rely on it and have to stay in constant control of the wheel.

Among the “just annoying” complaints: the door locking is erratic. Sometimes, when you lock the car, the wing mirrors fold in and the car gives a little “Beep”. Or not. Mostly, either the mirrors don’t fold in, or it doesn’t Beep, or both. The passenger side button to make the door handles pop out sometimes works, and sometimes not, and you have to walk around to the Driver’s side to open the doors.

The tyre pressure warning system is also very erratic. It’s potentially a great system that will tell you the pressure and temperature of each tyre, but it it’s easily triggered into alarm mode. It’ll suddenly light up and point out a tiny difference in tyre pressures, like 39.8 psi on one tyre compared at 40.2 on the other three, and go into warning mode. Sometimes it fixes itself and the warning lights eventually switch off. Other times it stays on for several days, and then fixes itself. Sometimes you have to pump up that tyre to get the lights to switch off. It’s also confused about which tyre it’s reading. It told me after a recent ruptured sidewall, that the RH rear tyre was rapidly losing pressure. I stepped out into speeding traffic to check the RH rear and it looked fine, so I got back in and drove off only to pull up again after 100m after realising there was something very wrong with the sound and steering of the car. It was in fact the LH FRONT tyre that had ruptured on the edge of a pothole, not the RH rear.

The charging system also has some annoying minor issues. The charging cable sometimes isn’t released when you unlock the door. You have to lock it and unlock it again, and only then can you disconnect the cable. I always charge the battery off the solar panels on my roof and have programmed the car to usually start charging at 8am and finish at 5pm. But say you come home one night after 5, and your battery is a bit low and you want to charge it up overnight, as often happens. There is a little blue button on screen labelled Charge Now and then a screen asks you whether you want to change your normal presets, or whether you want to change it just this once. I always click on Just Once, but guess what? The next day I have to re-programme my scheduled charging, my preferred times having been wiped.

There are other annoying little quirks. On every journey, a woman’s voice from somewhere inside the dashboard warns me: ”For your own safety, please select low beam”. And she’ll say it at any time of day or night, especially in bright sunlight when the lights aren’t even on. I generally liken the electronics and the user interface of this car to living with a wilful, petulant, capricious and troublesome teenage girl.

And I have very little kind to say about BYD service currently in Australia. I paid $260 for a rubber boot liner when specifying my new car purchase, but never received it. It was out of stock at the time, but the salesman promised they’d get it to me as soon as they came in. 18 months and three or four phone calls later, and I’ve given up waiting.

Talking to their support team in Brisbane has also been a total waste of time. The call centre people have - in the few times I’ve called them- had almost no knowledge of anything they’ve been asked about, and have defaulted to “Well you’d better bring it in to our Service Centre”. Without considering that would mean a full day wasted in driving more than 300km and waiting around for their technicians. To be fair, they now have a new service centre that’s a bit closer to me - only a 170 km round trip. More often than not, the problems have fixed themselves, or I’ve worked out how to fix it.

Despite the salesman assuring me the Complimentary Roadside Assist was for the full four years of the Warranty Period, when I needed a tow truck recently because of that ruptured tyre mentioned above, National Roadside Assist informed me that the cover was only for one year, and had expired. No-one told me. When I complained to BYD Support, they said I should have received an email just before it expired, but predictably, Nope. Sorreeee, was all I got from them.

When the tow truck driver was puzzled about what setting was required to safely move the car, we tried the On Screen Users Manual. But clicking on the Search bar didn’t bring up a keyboard so we gave up on that. The towie couldn’t find anything on line on his phone, so I rang BYD Support but the person I spoke to also had no idea. I asked him to ask his colleagues if anyone else there knew…another blank. In the end, the towie worked it out, no thanks to BYD.

And they’re not in the good books of my panel beater. My car was in his shop for almost one month, with him getting very frustrated when despite repeated attempts, he says BYD wouldn’t tell him for almost 2 weeks how to safely weld on a new body panel without scrambling the electrics or electronics. I also heard some horror stories about BYD parts and service from a staff member at a MyCar that I went to for a regular service.

I could go on, but to cut a very long story short, it’s a great car -sadly let down by the electronics and by the Australian distribution/service network.