The importer of BYD electric vehicles in Australia, EV Direct, says its website crashed late last week under the sheer weight of interest in the newly launched Seal, an electric sedan that is expected to provide stiff competition for the market leader, the Tesla Model 3.
In a LinkedIn post on Friday, EV Direct’s Like Todd revealed that the website failed for around 10-minutes after having around 50,000 visitors using the configurator in the first 24 hours after the launch last Tuesday.
“Apologies to anyone who may have been inconvenienced when our site crashed for 10 minutes when we launched,” he wrote.
“We had roughly 50,000 website configurations from customers within the first 24 hours so even our own pre launch IT pressure testing could not have foreseen such a high level of interest.”
The BYD Seal is the first electric sedan to fall under the $50,000 mark in Australia. The base model of the Seal, known as Dynamic, starts at $49,888 before on-roads.
This variant packs a single-motor rear-wheel-drive powertrain that delivers 150 kW of power and up to 310 Nm of torque. With that, it can accelerate from 0-100 km/h fairly quickly in just 7.5 seconds.
This configuration is paired with a BYD blade battery pack with a capacity of 61.44 kWh. This helps deliver up to 460 km of WLTP range.
On the charging front, the Dynamic Seal can be fast-charged at up to 110 kW. AC charging of 7 kW if on offer on all trims.
The higher trim variants bump the battery pack up to 82 kWh while increasing fast-charging speeds to 150 kW at the right charger.
Speaking of the other variants with the larger battery, they include:
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Premium – $58,798 before on-roads
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Performance – $68,748 before on-roads (down $50 since launch)
The Performance variant has had a $50 price cut since launching last week to help it get under the subsidy caps in certain states such as NSW. This will help more people to consider the Seal’s top trim which packs acceleration figures of 0-100 km/h in just 3.8 seconds.
As of last week, the BYD Seal was available to see at BYD’s Megastore in Alexandria so those electric sedan fans can see one in Sydney.
Interested buyers can configure the car on BYD’s online configurators with deliveries expected to begin before Christmas this year.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.