BYD Dolphin - Reliability & safety
It’s too soon to make a call on reliability, but a six-year warranty shows BYD is confident about its cars
The BYD Dolphin and the BYD brand are too new to have appeared in the latest Driver Power customer satisfaction survey. We’ll have to wait to hear more from owners about what it's like to run a Dolphin, so if you buy one after reading our review, please submit your experiences to our survey to help future owners out.
Safety is good because all versions of the Dolphin come with plenty of safety kit; you don’t need to upgrade to a high-spec model to get all the latest tech. A 360-degree camera with parking sensors is standard, along with lane assist, blind spot monitoring and autonomous emergency braking (AEB). You also get traffic sign recognition and speed limit assist technology on all models.
Euro NCAP gave the car a five-star rating in 2023, scoring 89 for adult protection and 87 for child protection. Safety assist was rated at 79, which is a little behind the Smart #3 tested at the same time.
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Key standard safety features |
Euro NCAP safety ratings |
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Warranty
BYD offers an excellent six-year warranty for the whole car, which covers all the normal things for up to 93,750 miles. That sounds like an odd figure, but it’s just the converted 150,000km figure used for Europe.
There’s also an eight-year warranty for the drive unit and the same for the battery, although the battery cover gets an even longer mileage limit of 125,000 miles. The body is covered for 12 years against rust, plus four years’ worth of breakdown cover included.
Servicing
Servicing is required every 24 months or 20,000 miles, whichever comes first. That’s typical of an electric car, although the Volkswagen ID.3 has a two-year, unlimited mileage service interval, which might be worthwhile to high-mileage drivers.
BYD offers a service plan for initial owners to manage the cost of maintenance.
