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Comment by jonathanlydall | Hacker News Reader

I just signed an offer to purchase a BYD Sealion 5, plugin hybrid small-to-medium SUV.

I’ve been largely happy with my 2018 Honda Fit and briefly researched a hybrid Fit.

In ZAR, the hybrid Fit is listed as ~530K, while the BYD is 570, however the BYD is way bigger, has much nicer interior and insanely more features, including: adaptive cruise control, lane assist (it can basically drive itself for simple traffic), 360 view camera, comparatively huge screen for my Apple CarPlay, sun roof, V2L (allows 2-3kw load off the battery or engine if the battery is low).

I largely liked my Honda Fit and my Ballade (that might be a South African model name), but have been annoyed for a long time at them being laggards on things like CarPlay (at least in South Africa, apparently the Fit in other markets had offered it for much longer).

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I was thinking why the hell someone visiting HN, so arguably curious and interested in technology, would go for a PHEV but then you mentioned South Africa.

It advertises 52km range, which is plenty enough for us for day-to-day driving to be entirely in EV mode.

I work from home and would prefer spending money on things like better school for kids, holidays, house being comfortable and as paid off as possible than on an over priced car as some sort of status symbol (it’s common for people here to choose to spend a fortune on their cars while living in small rented apartments, it’s quite financially stupid).

I also believe that we pay comparatively high taxes on our motor vehicles, our location probably also means that shipping here just costs more, the Sealion 5 is ZAR 570K which is about EUR 29.6K / USD 34.8K

Edit: Seems Sealion 5 price here not necessarily high compared to other countries. It might be BYD “entering the market” and thus putting less of a markup. Hyundai did that here in the early 2010s, but China is a different beast so who knows.

Own the sealion 7. It is feature full, and don’t want to crush your dreams, but i would trade that killer unreliable adaptive cruise control and lane assist with a (missing?!) simple speed limiter 100 times over

I don’t mind the honesty.

Price is so good that even if it’s a little lacking in this regard, I’ll probably still be very happy as a lot of the features are just a bonus.

Important for us was that it’s bigger as we have two growing kids, and that it is essentially an electric that we can plug in to charge.

I’ve only ever used simple cruise control on my CVT Fit and before that on a manual. On the BYD test drive (on my own chosen route) the cruise control seemed to work at least as well as what I was used to and the adaptive in traffic was impressive (to me whose never before had it), but was just one drive so will see how I feel after driving it for a while.

Also, I certainly wouldn’t count on it, but it’s conceivable that a software update could improve things, my honest hunch though is that it would be very unlikely.

I was just referring to specifically the cruise control which seems useful only in traffic conditions. As soon as the road gets a bit cleared up it has a tendency to accelerate too much, and a bit too eagerly.

But we have similar conditions, 2kids and in need of space and Sealion 7 won over many other EVs for number of features, platform, and especially price.

The OTA updates are quite regular and for us one fixed a bug that did not let the doors lock entirely when the car was off.

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