Chinese car giant BYD has confirmed that its smallest and most popular electric vehicle – the Atto 1 – is about to land on Australian shores with expectations that it will be the lowest price EV on the market.
The announcements comes a month after BYD said the vehicle would be made available for New Zealand this year, with The Driven highlighting at the time that it would likely open the doors for the model to land in Australia.
No pricing for the new model has been made official, but we can expect it to fall well under the base model BYD Dolphin, which starts at $29,990 before on-roads.
“The Atto 1 will be Australia’s most affordable EV by some margin, opening the door for even more Australians to get behind the wheel of their own new energy vehicle,” BYD Australia chief operating officer Stephen Collins said in a statement.
“As we’ve seen with those incredible sales numbers overseas, we expect really strong pre-order interest locally. When it comes to the Atto range, start believing the hype.”
According to BYD, the Atto 1 hatchback, as well as the recently approved Atto 2 SUV models, will be launched in November this year.
The Australian version are likely to be similar to the Atto 1 offerings in New Zealand, where it will have two variants, starting with the Essential model, which will come with BYD’s 30 kWh blade battery pack, and up to 220 km of WLTP range.
This pack will power the entry-level variant’s front-mounted 65 kW motor and allow a 0-100 km/h sprint in approximately 13 seconds.
There will also be a top-spec Premium variant with a bigger 42 kWh battery pack, which is good for 310 km of WLTP range. That top-spec Atto 1 comes with a more powerful 114 kW motor, which reduces the same 0-100 km/h sprint time by around 4 seconds to around 9 seconds.
On the inside of this model, 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 was officially launched at the Shanghai auto show in April 2023 as the BYD Seagull.
Since then, the company has delivered hundreds of thousands of these cars to customers in China and across the world, bringing cumulative sales to over a million by May 2025.
At the same time, earlier this year, the company launched a bigger Seagull in Europe under the new name and released its pricing and specs.
For that market, it’s grown in size by 210 mm, coming in just shy of 4 metres at 3,990 mm in length. It also saw an increase in height which has gone up by 50 mm, with the car now standing 1,590 mm tall.
More information on pre-ordering this hatchback will be made available later this month.
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.