BYD Atto 3: Unmasking an EV success story
China’s BYD is now the leading electric car brand in Singapore. But could its new model propel it to mainstream success?
YOU may never have driven a BYD car or even sat in one, but there’s a high chance you’ve come into close contact with one of the Shenzhen-headquartered conglomerate’s most ubiquitous products. BYD is the world’s biggest producer of face masks, according to Liu Xueliang, the general manager of BYD’s Asia-Pacific automobile sales division.
“We make masks because of social responsibility,” Liu told The Business Times (BT) through an interpreter, adding that the company donated 30 million surgical face masks to local communities in Singapore.
Liu is in town not to talk face masks, but to launch the Atto 3, an electric Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) making its debut here today. With a 150 kilowatt (kW) motor, the 5-seater accelerates to 100 km/h in 7.3 seconds and can cover 480 kilometres on a single charge. It is roughly the size of Toyota’s RAV4, the world’s best-selling SUV, but at a promotional price of S$178,888 inclusive of Certificate Of Entitlement, the Atto3 retails for about 10 per cent less.
Quirky design elements set it apart from other mainstream cars. It has a central touchscreen that can rotate between portrait and landscape orientations, cabin panels that resemble human muscle tissue, and door pockets made of elastic strings that make musical notes when plucked.
More serious features include a built-in drive recorder, 7 airbags, blind-spot monitors, and adaptive cruise control that lets the car accelerate and stop automatically in traffic jams. With petrol pump prices near record highs, one killer proposition might be the fact that its 60.5 kilowatt-hour battery pack, a BYD design that uses the individual battery cells to add rigidity to the car’s body structure, only costs a little over S$30 to top up at a public charging station. A 50 kW direct current (DC) charger would need roughly an hour to take the battery from empty to 80 per cent.
At only 0.6 per cent, electric vehicles (EVs) still account for a puny section of the overall car population here, but sales are picking up. There were less than 3,000 passenger electric cars on the roads at the start of the year, but in the first 5 months another 1,000 have joined them, meaning their ranks have grown by a third even though the overall car population has stagnated.
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Whether that amounts to a tipping point that sees drivers abandon combustion power for good, BYD has already fared well in the EV space here. Its year-to-date registrations (up to May) total 246 units, enough to wrest the electric car sales crown from Tesla (at 190 cars).
Yet, Liu said the brand has had to slog for its success here. He pointed out that BYD has already been in Singapore for a decade. Most of the time was spent hawking the benefits of switching to electric power to a population whose interest in EVs was practically non-existent then. The company ran a fleet of taxis and has pushed fleet customers to trial its electric buses, forklifts and sanitation trucks here. “Whatever we’ve achieved today, we don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Liu said. “The things that we’ve done in Singapore have been to prove that EVs are a solution.”
The Atto 3 now has a foundation to build on, but its sales performance will signal where EVs stand in the Singapore market. The early signs are promising. Authorised dealer Vantage Automotive, a Sime Darby unit, says around 300 people have expressed serious interest in the car, enough to account for the rest of the year’s Singapore allocation. A source told BT that the company has had to “adjust” its factory order, which is industry speak that means it is scrambling to buy more cars to meet demand that it didn’t anticipate.
Next year, the brand will be adding 2 more models to its lineup here. The Dolphin hatchback (think Volkswagen Golf) would qualify for the cheaper Category A Certificate Of Entitlement, giving EV fans an affordable option. Also headed here is the Seal, a sporty sedan about the size of a Tesla Model 3, and with similar performance. A twin motor version accelerates like a Lamborghini, hitting 100 km/h in just 3.8 seconds.
With a fuller lineup, BYD could hit the big leagues (Tesla cracked the top 10 with only 1 model last year, its first with an official presence here), although it remains an open question how local car buyers will take to a Chinese design.
So far it has been much better to bet on BYD than against it, however. Famed investor Warren Buffett was an early believer, plunking down US$232 million to buy a stake in 2008 that is now reportedly worth US$7.7 billion.
As for ordinary consumers, Liu is adamant that buyers care more now about whether something fits into their lifestyle than where it comes from.
“Whether it’s something you eat, use or wear, many things in daily life come from China,” he said, before pointing to a BYD face mask that another journalist in the room was wearing. “That was also made in China.”
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