• Plenty of room front and rear, with an airy feel
• Rear boot is large – and there’s one at the front, too
• Lots of storage space, sadly no hatchback

How much space is there?

The BYD’s clever slimline ‘blade’ battery enables the Seal to have a low and flat floor. The benefit for you is that it has excellent interior space front and rear – something of a relief, as the sleek roofline could easily have made the Seal feel very cramped inside.

Four six-footers can sit in comfort, which you can’t say about the Polestar 2, and the massive panoramic glass roof, instead of robbing headroom, actually provides a couple of extra inches for rear passengers.

Boot space and storage

The boot is an acceptable 402 litres in capacity, though as a saloon you lose the flexibility that a hatchback would provide. The loading aperature is low and wide, but not very tall – similar to the Tesla Model 3, but a positive point is that the rear seats do fold down, improving practicality.

Obviously a hatchback would have been better, but you can’t have it all. In addition to this, there’s a 53-litre lidded storage area under the bonnet, an ideal place to store your charging cables.

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Is it easy to park?

The Seal manages to fit easily into UK parking spaces, but isn’t great in terms of visibility – which is tempered by the fact it’s peppered with cameras. Forward visibility is okay, but hampered by a bulky A-pillar, and the side and rear windows are shallow, which makes over-the-shoulder view a little limited.

If you’re struggling with visibilty in car parks, the good news is that all Seal models come with front and rear parking sensors, a 360-degree camera that displays a video feed on the central screen, and you can adjust the view on a virtual car displayed centrally. Also, flipping the screen to portrait gives you more camera views.

Safety

• Euro NCAP five-star result in 2023
• Excellent collision avoidance technology
• Intrusive driver-assistance tech

The BYD Seal helps shake any lingering doubts about the safety of Chinese cars, earning a solid five stars in its Euro NCAP test. So, it comes with all of the expected crash avoidance technology as standard, such as autonomous emergency braking, lane departure warning and blindspot monitoring.

It comes with an excellent adaptive cruise control system, which looks after lane keeping and maintaining your distances, but it can be a little jittery around white lines. The lane-keeping system is also quite aggressive, which may cause you to want to switch it off – and that’s done via a buried menu, and needs to be done every time you switch on the car.

Finally, it’s worth saying that BYD also makes a huge deal about the levels of safety testing carried out on its LFP blade battery. So, crushing and piercing won’t cause the battery pack to catch fire – something that can’t be said by the majority of its rivals. The Seal’s all-electric architecture ensure impressive structural integrity, and a rigid passenger compartment. But the Tesla Model 3 is even safer.

Watch: BYD Seal crash test video