Byd Seal AWD

[music_cities]

I'm in Germany/Austria/Italy (Dolomites) driving the Byd Seal dual motor on a rental from Hertz. The car is great but not better than my 2022 GT PE MachE. The things I like better are the HUD, the higher range (more efficient I guess, since the battery is about the same size), and the ventilated seats are sure nice in the heat wave.

It's not as fun to drive as the MachE, even though it has a lot of acceleration. The adaptive cruise control and intelligent cruise control (lane keeping) are not as good as Ford's. It watches me and always tells me I look tired, and that I should stop for coffee. Ok, sure, I love coffee, but it's not a confidence booster to be told that one looks tired all the time! This has to be turned off on EACH DRIVE!. The "keep eyes on the road" nanny cam is also weird, you actually have to look literally at the road, you can't just be watching the cars that are driving on the road.

The frunk is useful. I haven't tried the back seats, but the front seats are all right, not as form-fitting as the MachE GT seats. It has a physical button to open the frunk! And, I found a menu item to precondition the battery! I haven't figured out whether the Tesla Superchargers are in the built-in navigation. CarPlay works ok.

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[GreaseMonkey]

Your thoughts confirm my bias that we make the Chinese appear better than they really are. I think we should be concerned, but not terrified that we throw the towel in round one. Are they capable of delivering a KO? Sure. But not in round one or two or three for that matter.

 

[music_cities]

I'm in Germany/Austria/Italy (Dolomites) driving the Byd Seal dual motor on a rental from Hertz. The car is great but not better than my 2022 GT PE MachE. The things I like better are the HUD, the higher range (more efficient I guess, since the battery is about the same size), and the ventilated seats are sure nice in the heat wave.

It's not as fun to drive as the MachE, even though it has a lot of acceleration. The adaptive cruise control and intelligent cruise control (lane keeping) are not as good as Ford's. It watches me and always tells me I look tired, and that I should stop for coffee. Ok, sure, I love coffee, but it's not a confidence booster to be told that one looks tired all the time! This has to be turned off on EACH DRIVE!. The "keep eyes on the road" nanny cam is also weird, you actually have to look literally at the road, you can't just be watching the cars that are driving on the road.

The frunk is useful. I haven't tried the back seats, but the front seats are all right, not as form-fitting as the MachE GT seats. It has a physical button to open the frunk! And, I found a menu item to precondition the battery! I haven't figured out whether the Tesla Superchargers are in the built-in navigation. CarPlay works ok.

The mountain roads in the Italian Dolomites are packed with Porsches, Lamborghinis, motorbikes, road bikes (cyclists), and everyone out to have a good time! It's crazy. It's all fun and games until we saw one accident between a motorcycle and a car, then things got a little more subdued.

A dual-motor EV with good regeneration is a dream in this terrain on these roads. One can't really drive *that* fast, so the total energy use is quite small. A lot of electricity is used to go up to the top of the pass, but then a good portion of it comes back into the car's battery going down the other side. The "one-pedal driving" (BYD doesn't call it that) is really nice to be able to speed up on the straights then slow down for the corners.

I'm still not really liking the Byd Seal, as compared to the 2022 MachE GT PE. It's a fine car, and the higher efficiency is nice, but its overall interior and exterior finishing quality is not as good. And there are odd tweaks in the UI that are more in-your-face than the annoying things about Sync.

 

[music_cities]

I'm home and driving my delicious 2022 MachE GT (Canadian edition so PE too).

Compared to the BYD Seal:

Efficiency: Wow, they don't call it the GT PIG for nothing, the Ford uses about 35% more electricity (23 kWh/100km vs 17 kWh/100km) although a big part of that might be the higher speeds in Canada vs the twisty windy mountain roads through villages in the Dolomites. Although the autobahn has 130km/h sections which suck back electricity.

UI: The Ford UI is much better! Much simpler, and easier to operate. The IPD in the BYD has a small font and too much information, the IPD in the MachE is easier to read. The BYD had a HUD which was nice for driving with distance glasses, I didn't need to look at the font in the IPD to see the speed, the speed limit, and the status of the "intelligent cruise control". The BYD has a "split screen" mode but neither Carplay nor the built in Nav support "Split Screen" so it's useless. There is no IPD display of the next turn (like in the MachE when it's less than 1km ahead), and there's no mini-card for the navigation system showing the next turn (like in the MachE), so the *only* way to see both navigation information and music/media information at the same time is to use a phone navigation system and then use the split screen in Carplay (or presumably Android auto). We really should love the IPD next turn information, and even if you don't want to use Connected Navigation routinely (e.g you prefer Google Maps, ABRP, or Apple Maps) you might want to consider using Connected Navigation for long trip legs so that you can use that mini-card display and keep your phone focused on Music. Oh, also, in 2 weeks of renting I never did figure out how to adjust the media volume without using the steering wheel controls!

Audio cues: The BYD would chime incessantly, first to tell me I looked tired (thanks, car, yes, I can accept that I *always* look tired) (I had to remember the sequence of menu items to turn off cabin perception and then turn it off on a straight simple section of road since it required looking at the display), and then every-time I exceeded the speed limit (I couldn't find any tolerance on that setting and didn't want to disable it entirely), and for the cross-traffic (handy beep, but it was hard to distinguish it from the other beeps!).

Cameras: The top-down display in the BYD didn't seem to be aligned right; it was harder to use it to park. The sweepy lines it drew for trajectory were handy though. It had a fun setting though to make the car transparent, and show the road under the car and only see the wheels. (I don't think it has a camera under the car but rather fills that in from what was there before you drove over the spot.). It was handy to be able to turn on the right or left camera to easily see the distance to the curb or cliff, it has side cameras that the MachE doesn't have.

AEB: The car hit the brakes hard twice, once when a pedestrian was peeking out from behind a van considering crossing the road, and one other time for a car (can't remember the details). I appreciated both of these, although I wouldn't have had an accident in either case. I don't think I've ever been able to activate the automatic emergency breaking on the MachE.

Lane Keeping: the BYD doesn't have "hands free" like Bluecruise. The "intelligent cruise control" lane keeping worked ok, *except* there was no audio cue when it turns off! The car seems to beep for every other thing, but didn't seem to beep when I had to take over the steering! Or maybe by then I was just so over-beeped that I didn't notice it. I did find that on the winding mountain roads the ACC car-following would often speed up when the car in front of me went around a sharp hairpin curve, I've never noticed that problem on the MachE but I don't think I've really explored congestion hairpin mountain roads with ACC on in the MachE.

HVAC: For all the complaining about the HVAC controls on the MachE the BYD ones are worse! But, the BYD has ventilated seats which are very handy in a heat wave.

Seats: I liked the seats but they didn't hug me quite as a much as the GT ones on the MachE. There didn't seem to be any way to recover the seat memory setting without going through several different menus. I was able to set up a more reclined "sports car" setting for the mountain roads that put me lower and further away from the pillars and the rear view mirror, to give me more visibility. My MachE seems very upright and tall now in comparison! Did I mention the seats are ventilated?

Suspension? I think I would have preferred my stiffer MachE suspension for the smooth-surface but curvy sports-car roads in the Dolomites. (Did I mention that those roads attract a lot of Porsches and Lamborghinis?). Now that I'm home driving the comparatively boring (yet pot-holed) city roads of Calgary, I wonder if I'd prefer a more traditional sedan's suspension, like that of the BYD.

Performance/Driving: The dual-motor BYD had a lot of acceleration, and handled the corners pretty well. I think the MachE would have been only marginally better on those fronts. The BYD doesn't seem to have true "1 pedal driving", but by turning on the regeneration to the highest value, one can drive twisty mountain roads without using the bake pedal very much. The BYD had different sport-modes that I forgot to plat with. (Other people we met complained about driving the mountain roads because as soon as they got any speed they'd just have to slow down for the corner, I countered that this was a joy in an electric vehicle, too bad they had a gas vehicle! )

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