Revealed: BYD’s big plan for Australia
A popular Chinese carmaker has launched an extraordinary assault on Australia’s established car brands.
The average car launch puts motoring writers behind the wheel of one new model, usually accompanied by a brief presentation and an opportunity to meet executives. But BYD isn’t an average car company.
So there are six fresh cars parked outside the briefing room at the old Holden proving ground in Lang Lang, including two from new luxury spin-off Denza.
If BYD is China’s Toyota - and it is - then Denza is its Lexus. The pair of opulent Denza four-wheel-drive hybrids parked outside are flanked by compact electric cars in the BYD Atto 1 and Atto 2, as well as family SUVs in the BYD Sealion 5 and Sealion 8.
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When the tech talk and slide show stretch into the second hour, it feels like the briefing for a military invasion. And BYD has big plans to deliver Shark and awe. The brand has new leadership with immense experience working with automotive giants.
BYD chief operating officer Stephen Collins, former director of Honda Australia, aims to overtake the likes of Hyundai, Kia and Mazda to sit toward the top of the sales charts in 2026.
“We’re here for the long term and we’re just laying the foundations down for being a leading player in the next five to ten years,” Collins says.
“This time last year we were number 16 in the market. Here today we’re now number eight … next year, if we weren’t close or in the top three, I think we’d be disappointed.
“We want to keep moving, we want to keep the trajectory going.”
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Having seen the way traditional car brands work, Collins is excited by BYD’s rapid-fire approach, which lends “a real advantage over a lot of legacy brands which tend to be, compared to this, pretty slow”.
Denza leader Mark Harland, a former Holden executive, agrees the pace of change in China far outstrips that of conventional car brands.
“We don’t talk in three to five year cycles at Denza and BYD … we talk in weeks and months,” he says.
“It’s not ‘you’ll get it in 5 years … it’s you’ll get it in 30 days or 60 days’.
“The turnaround time and receptivity to our needs in Australia, New Zealand is like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”
Harland says Australia is “ripe for disruption”, and Denza has learned from the failure of Nissan’s Infiniti and the slow progress of Hyundai’s Genesis to build a plan for success.
It starts with a pair of four-wheel-drives that combine potent plug-in hybrid powertrains with proper off-road features and posh luxury touches for price points likely to embarrass the establishment.
The Denza B5 merges beefed-up BYD Shark 6 plug-in hybrid running gear in a package similar in size to the Audi Q5, while the Denza B8 is an even more potent alternative to the likes of Lexus’ LandCruiser-based LX series.
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At the other end of the spectrum, BYD’s Atto 1 electric car promises to be the most affordable EV in the nation. While prices have not been revealed, you can expect the entry-level model to deliver 65kW of power and about 220km of range from a 30kWh battery for about $25,000.
We sampled a premium version (in lime green) with a bigger 43.2kWh battery and 115KW motor during a brief test drive and came away charmed by its quiet refinement, zesty acceleration and corner-carving agility.
BYD doesn’t expect the budget hatch to sell in enormous numbers - after all, the compact hatchback market is so small that cars like the Ford Fiesta, Honda Jazz and Renault Clio no longer exist in Aussie showrooms - but it does hope to shake up the establishment with an electric car that undercuts petrol hatchbacks.
We can’t tell you how other new models including the Denza duo drive. Yet. But we can agree with Hasan that BYD’s looming product offensive is evidence the Chinese giant takes the Australian market “so seriously”.
“It’s a mature western market that has very unique tastes and very high expectations for durability, capability and performance,” he says. “If we can succeed in Australia then it puts BYD in a good place for being competitive in other regions of the world.”
