BYD’s smallest and best-selling EV, the Seagull – with over 1 million sales globally – will soon be flocking in New Zealand after a major announcement by BYD’s New Zealand team.
According to EVs and Beyond, BYD New Zealand’s country manager, Warren Willmot, says the company’s smallest and most affordable electric hatchback will be landing across the ditch with the name Atto 1.
It will be heading there with two variants, starting with the Essential model, which will come with BYD’s 30 kWh blade battery pack, packing up to 220 km of WLTP range.
This pack will feed the entry-level variant’s front-mounted 65 kW motor and will be able to do the 0-100 km/h sprint in around 13 seconds.
There will also be a Premium variant with a bigger 42 kWh battery pack, which is good for 310 km of WLTP range.
That top-spec Atto 1 brings in a more powerful 114 kW motor as well, which improves the same 0-100 km/h sprint time to around 9 seconds.
Moving inside, there’s a centred infotainment screen which comes in at 10.1 inches. Like other BYDs, this screen rotates and includes Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for the owner’s convenience by bringing their favourite apps into the car.
The Atto 1 is likely to be launched in New Zealand on this side of Christmas 2025, with presales of the cars expected to happen by November.
This helps ramp things up in the New Zealand market, which has seen huge success for the BYD product amongst consumers as well as large government and fleet customers over recent years.
The BYD Seagull/Dolphin Surf/Atto 1 was officially launched at the Shanghai auto show in April 2023. It was then reportedly the star of that show, raking in thousands of orders in only a few days of being there.
Since then, the company has delivered multiple hundred thousand of these cars to customers in China and across the world, bringing cumulative sales to over a million by May 2025.
That milestone for this city hatchback took just over two years since the unveiling, making it the company’s most popular single model.
This year also saw BYD launch a bigger Seagull in Europe under the new name and release its pricing and specs.
For that market, it’s grown in size by 210 mm for the European market, coming in just shy of 4 metres at 3,990 mm in length. The height has also gone up by 50 mm, with the car now standing 1,590 mm tall.
It’s unclear if BYD plans to release the European model in New Zealand, but it’s great to see it bring this model to market there. This latest news from across the ditch could open the door for our market, but that’s yet to be confirmed.
We look forward to following these developments in New Zealand because if the price is right, it could very well be the most affordable fleet-friendly EV in the market.
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.