BYD Seal - Boot space, comfort & practicality

The BYD Seal is a four-door saloon that’s slightly bigger than the Tesla Model 3. Thanks to a super-thin ‘blade’ battery pack not taking up too much space under the floor of the car, the BYD feels like a much bigger car inside compared with a traditionally powered petrol or diesel car. Indeed, there’s enough room up front for even taller adults. All versions come with electrically adjustable front seats with electric lumbar support and driver’s side memory settings.

All Seals come with front and rear parking sensors, along with a 360-degree camera system. The latter is often an expensive option on its rivals, and while it has a number of neat tricks, such as being able to generate an image of what’s below the car, the camera quality isn’t as sharp as it could be, however.

Dimensions and size

The Seal measures 4,800mm in length, 1,460mm in height, and 1,875mm in width. That makes it bigger in all directions than the Model 3, but smaller than the Volkswagen ID.7 at 4,961mm in length. The extra size of the latter might become an issue when trying to park in a tight multi-storey car park, though.

Seats, leg room, head room & passenger space

An adult approaching six foot tall can fit in the back in the outer positions, although their head will be quite close to the roof lining. That being said, a Hyundai Ioniq 6 isn’t exactly stellar in this department, especially if you go for a version with a sliding glass sunroof. If you need to fit taller teenagers or adults in the back, then consider the Volkswagen ID.7. It provides a vast amount of head and limo-like leg room for rear seat occupants. It’ll be more comfortable on longer trips, too, because the high-floor in the Seal and relatively flat seat base means it doesn’t have much under thigh support. 

The Seal comes with ISOFIX child seat mounting points on the front passenger seat, and the outer positions on the rear bench.

Boot space

The BYD Seal’s 400-litre capacity is some way off the 532 litres of capacity you get in a Volkswagen ID.7. You can’t drop the rear seats in the Seal, so it won’t be very useful for a trip to IKEA compared with the more versatile ID.7, or BMW i4. The latter gets a handy 40/20/40 split folding rear seat design.

The Seal's saloon bodystyle means it gets a narrow boot opening, making it much less easy to load taller items than the hatchback style i4 and ID.7. The BYD does have some helpful features, such as some underfloor storage for hiding smaller items away, and there’s a useful 53-litre boot at the front, like in the Model 3, for keeping the charge cables away from anything you don’t want getting dirty.