Han and Tang driving report: can BYD do premium cars?

BYD caused quite a stir a few years ago when it announced its intention to build a battery with 3,000 charging cycles. The first vehicles with the so-called ‘Blade battery‘ are the Han sedan and the Tang SUV (named after the ages of the Chinese imperial dynasties of the same name), with which BYD wants to demonstrate that they can not only build affordable mass-produced vehicles like the Atto 3 but also want to play in the luxury class. Can they succeed?

Same platform, fundamentally different vehicles

The Han and Tang both have the same technical basis: four-wheel drive, the aforementioned Blade battery with LFP cells (with slightly different capacities of 85.4 kWh and 86.4 kWh, respectively); both are based on combustion models and are almost five metres long (Han: 4.99 m, Tang: 4.87 m).

Han: Inspired by Tesla and Mercedes

It is hard to miss where the BYD designers got their inspiration for the Han: A tidy, closed front without an imitation grille, retractable door handles, and large exterior mirrors with chrome trim at the bottom is familiar from the Tesla Model S. The interior is designed to be very “glossy” in the centre console, while the mini gear selector and the combination of light leather with a lot of aluminium (look) are very clearly reminiscent of Mercedes. This is not meant in a negative way; both sources of inspiration are well chosen and add up to a coherent picture.

Despite quick acceleration from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.9 seconds, the Han is definitely not a sports car. With a massive centre armrest in the rear (including a touchscreen) and electrically adjustable individual seats in the rear, it is clearly a chauffeur’s car. The individual seats cannot be folded down, but there is a small hatch to the 410-litre boot. A clever detail is that if you fold away the centre console, there is room for three passengers in the rear, but the touchscreen disappears. There is a second, smaller touchscreen between the two front seats So that you can still control the infotainment from the back.

With our test consumption of 21.2 kWh/100km on the motorways in the Amsterdam area (which, like everywhere else in the Netherlands, are limited to 100 km/h), the real range is a good 400 kilometres, so you can definitely make yourself comfortable in the back seats for a longer time. Unfortunately, charging also takes a little longer. The DC peak power is 120 kW, and it takes 30 minutes to charge the batteries from 30 to 80 per cent, so you need to allow for quite a bit of charging time for long journeys.

Tang: Space for the whole family

Although the Tang is twelve centimetres shorter, it has room for two more passengers thanks to a third row of seats. The rearmost two seats can be folded down individually, the middle row in a 60:40 ratio. In addition, the middle row can be moved longitudinally so that legroom in the second and third rows is variable. Taller people will tend to have less space in the last row, but people of average height can sit comfortably in all seats.

For long holiday trips with seven people, the luggage compartment might be a limiting factor. With the third row folded down, there is not much room for luggage (235 litres vs. 1,655 litres when all seats are folded down). With 27 kWh/100km, the Tang proved to be rather power-hungry, but with a cW value of 0.33 and almost 2.5 tonnes kerb weight, this is not surprising, especially as we also tested out the strong acceleration (4.6 seconds to 100 km/h) from time to time.

Our practical range was found to be 320 kilometres. Combined with its mixed DC charging performance (just as slow as the Han), the Tang is probably more of a family car with plenty of space for the city than a holiday car or company car for frequent long journeys.

While the two electric vehicles look quite different from the outside, they are similar in many ways. Both appear much bulkier and larger than they actually are, and both want to be the boss on the road. Unfortunately, both lack a premium sound system and the rolling and flowing noises are much more dominant than in the competition. The brake pedal feels strangely soft at the beginning, but during the braking test, the Brembo system is convincing and brings the cars to a halt surprisingly quickly. When things need to move quickly, both are as nippy as you would expect from electric cars, despite their size. Despite 380 kW engine power, however, both models top out at 180 km/h (which is pretty irrelevant outside Germany anyway).

The infotainment has similar software in both models, which is relatively tidy but hides some functions in hard-to-find places. Activating the seat heating, for example, is relatively awkward – but other functions you need much less often have a direct hardware button. In the Tang, the centre display can be rotated electrically at the touch of a button, while in the Han, this comes with a fixed in landscape format. On the other hand, the Han requires you to look away from the road less often because, unlike the Tang, it has a head-up display.

The assistance systems in both vehicles are expandable (at least the Han driver has their chauffeur for that), as is the voice control (the Tang has none, the Han at least has a microphone button, but it didn’t work during our test). Paradoxically, although the Han has more space for the rear passengers, the thigh support in the Tang is significantly better – thanks to the higher roof line. Here, so-called foot garages (indentations in the battery to position the feet lower) would have helped the Han but these are much more difficult to realise with the Blade battery than with conventional modules.

Price-performance kings and eye-catchers

Tang and Han are quality cars, which is something Europeans who are used to mass-produced wares from China might find unlikely. Of course, the Han is not the best chauffeur-driven limo on the market: a BMW i7 is more comfortable, a Mercedes EQS consumes less, a Porsche Taycan charges faster, and a Tesla Model S accelerates more quickly. But in one respect, the Han (and also its SUV brother) mercilessly leads the aforementioned competitors: Price. Both vehicles start at around 71,000 euros – a bargain for a chauffeur-driven sedan and a seven-seat premium SUV, respectively, no other OEM offers an electric luxury class at such a low price.

There is no reason to panic (yet), especially because the charging performance of both models does not yet match the luxury class claim. This is one of the reasons why Han and Tang will not be able to take much market share away from the previous premium market leaders. But maybe it’s not about selling as many Hans or Tangs as possible. Perhaps these two vehicles are primarily meant to be eye-catchers to lure prospective buyers into the BYD showrooms, where they will come across the much more sophisticated Atto 3? Because of its much lower price, this is probably the most interesting BYD vehicle at the moment.