I checked out a half dozen “long term” reviews from Australia and Asia about these cars and find some curious quirks not well reported yet in the US. The first is the range claims are utter horse shit. They don’t get nearly the distance or efficiency advertised. The battery charging is really slow even at max juice input. They often have mechanical bugs that reflect poor engineering development attention to detail: crap reverse camera (worse than a Ring), interior materials the same color but different and mismatched shades, wiper and signal indicator stalks on opposite sides from the expected (as in different than every other car on the market), ridiculously cheap stock tires, and one developed a “concerning” steering return-to-center friction needing service attention.

Most of these reviews were in the 15,000 to 20,000 km range. That’s right - km, not miles! Personally I’m anti-hype on BYD because while I am also anti-Tesla, I find mass market engineering from China to consistently underwhelm. For comparison, I loved my Volkswagen Golf GTI 1.8T 5 speed from 2003. How many millions of those well engineered, reasonably priced VW Golfs of that generation were manufactured and sold worldwide? I’m really interested in the new MB CLA. Prius 2.0 looks sexy as hell.

To be frank, until I see somebody like Jeremy Clarkson review a BYD, or Tavarish, or Lewis Black, I’m reluctant to feel like I’m missing out here in the US. There’s already enough image-over-substance crap in this country. Can one of these actually make it 30,000 miles in everyday use in the DFW Metroplex without shaking themselves to pieces or becoming insufferably tedious?!