BYD Dolphin: A Good Catch or Bad Fish?

Have you ever gone fishing?

If you haven’t, you should. It is pretty boring, to be honest. You do all your preparations with the fishing rod, setting up the bait, casting a line and you just…. Sit there. If it’s not your day you will return home empty-handed. If it is, you will have a good time but it will still be boring. (EDITOR’S NOTE: The views expressed here are the writers. The editor rather enjoys fishing and was slightly annoyed)

You will likely catch a bunch of similar-looking fish that science says are different but to you, it’s the same boring fish. But occasionally you will come across one such fish that looks similar but is yet different. Not trying to be overly unique and swimming alone, you see it swimming in the same school but different from the rest. Maybe a certain color or a certain shine on the scales, maybe a shorter fin, or even a pirate fish with just one eye perhaps. But you know it is different the moment you see it. That’s the kind of car BYD Dolphin aims to be.

BYD’s take on the Dolphin is to make a car that looks and feels like a car from the present but at the same time gives you a little taste of the inevitable future of mobility that’s approaching fast. We have gotten the Dolphin with us for an entire day and we aim to find out if the Dolphin is really a good catch or a fish out of water.

Let us start with the looks.

When viewed in solidarity with nothing to compare it to, the Dolphin deceives you into looking small, it is only when there is a car next to it that you realise its healthy proportions.

Talking in numbers the BYD Dolphin is 4,290mm long, 1,770mm wide, 1,570mm tall, and comes with a 2,700mm wheelbase. If the numbers are difficult to visualise, let’s put it this way. The Dolphin is only 10mm (a fingernail) shorter, 20mm (a fingertip) narrower, 65mm (an entire hand) lower, and 90mm (an entire leg) LONGER than one of the most popular SUVs in the country, the Hyundai Creta. This is a chunky boy but it does an excellent job of hiding it.

The Dolphin looks smart, it adopts a new design concept dubbed the “Ocean Aesthetics” by BYD which is mainly characterised by sleek and smooth lines. The front of the Dolphin gets a stylish pair of all-LED headlights with DRLs which combine to span the entire bonnet. The entire section of the front, from the A-pillar to the end of the front bumper is one smooth shell that is interrupted by any protruding element.

The bonnet neatly spills over to the fenders as we get to the profile, this is where the smooth design has been given some contrast by adding sharp lines and creases to add some element. You get two pronounced creases, one diagonal streak rising up from the bottom of the rear fender towards the front door and the other is a straight line just below the shoulder line striking through the door handles. Speaking of which, is a traditional flap-style door handle but finished in a way that it sits flush with the doors resulting in better aero. The outside mirrors too are shaped almost like a smooth egg so it can glide through the air with ease. Additional elements on the profile are the blackened C-Pillar to hide the bulk and a neat set of 16-inch black alloy wheels on 195/60 tires that could have been a smidge bigger but look well-proportioned.

Over on the back, the Dolphin ditches the smooth shell in favour of a protruding bumper section and neatly packs up the look with faux rear vents. You also get an all-LED tail light treatment that spans the boot with “Build Your Dreams'' embossed in all its glory. Apart from that you get a shark fin antenna and a spoiler-mounted brake lamp. Overall the Dolphin comes up as a smooth and streamlined car with plenty of fresh design elements that make it feel modern without making it difficult to approach. It is skilfully packaged to make one of the most pleasant-looking cars on the market.

The cabin of the Dolphin is one of the best we have seen.

An interior design “embraced by waves” as BYD likes to call it, the Dolphin’s interior walks the delicate slack line of balance between being modern and timeless at the same time. Let’s talk about the colour scheme first, you get a two-tone interior, and depending on what exterior colour you pick your interior will be in brown/black, pink/grey, and grey/black.

Our unit came with a Brown/Black scheme and it is such a lovely shade of brown. You get brown accented elements in the cabin, the trim on the door pads, the lower half of the dashboard, and the seats. The cabin is dotted with little design elements that impersonate things from the aquatic world. The door handles look like the elegant fins of a dolphin, there are windshield vents that look like pristine scales on a fish, and there’s a space carved out on the dash that mimics the pattern of waves hitting a shoreline. The non-fishy details include tweeters designed to look like high-quality fishnets, and neatly finished A/C vents that look like jet propellers on a speed boat that sits on a grey band that looks like it has been ripped out from an expensive yacht.

Another yacht steal is the seats, these bucket seats with contrast faux leather upholstery make that cabin feel more expensive than it is. Let us talk more about these seats; although they come with manual adjustment, finding the perfect driving position in this seat is easy. With just the right amount of cushioning and meaty side bolsters, these seats keep you comfortable and hold you in place well. Once you’ve sat down you will find overall visibility is really good, you get a big glass house all around and front quarter glass as well.

The flat bottom steering wheel then comes to hand. It is a chunky boy beautifully finished in black and silver with steering-mounted controls that feel premium to the touch. You get a little 5-inch driver instrument screen that is mounted on the steering column itself rather than the dashboard, that way even after you have adjusted the steering wheel to your desired level of reach and rake you can see the instrument screen.

The other screen is a big boy coming in at 12.8 inches. This tablet of a screen is one of the smoothest to operate and allows you to engage every feature of the car from entertainment to climate to safety, it comes with wired Apple CarPlay, and Android Auto, and just like the Atto 3, you can rotate this screen to portrait or landscape orientation from the press of a button on the steering wheel. Just below the screen is a place for your phone or other items and below that is a neatly packaged set of cylindrical buttons and dials that let you toggle the drive selector, drive modes, regen, hazard, climate controls, and volume.

Below those controls, you get a storage bay with USB-C and USB-A charging ports, cupholders, parking controls, and another slot for your phone followed by the central armrest. Beneath the armrest is a cavernous storage area that can even fits a large bag. You get decent-sized bottle holders on all four doors and a 345-liter boot that can go up to 1310-liter when the 60:40 split rear seats are folded allowing you to carry tons of luggage.

Seating three in the back seat isn’t an issue. The e-Platform 3.0 the Dolphin sits on top of allows the car to have a long wheelbase and short overhangs. Paired with a flat floor, rear occupants have room to stretch and tag along on any road trip without complaining about more space. Overall, the cabin of the Dolphin is simply amazing, it looks great, feels premium, and is so practical, and we think it will stand the test of time and age handsomely as well.

We’ve driven plenty of electric cars by now.

And the Dolphin doesn’t blow our minds with its driving capabilities. It is not the fastest accelerating car nor clocks high numbers on the Speedo. It just works. It is effortless like any good EV should be. Get in, press start, shift into the Drive, and just go. It is the handling that shines.

The Dolphin has nailed a few things, a lower centre of gravity, a wider track with wide tires, a nicely weighted steering wheel, right cushioning on the suspension, and precise power mapping. All these combine to give Dolphin a thrilling drive. While the numbers on paper suggest a Dolphin on sedatives, on the tarmac the Dolphin is spritely in all its glory. The power is put down in such a way that it will take you to 50 km/h fast and then start to fizzle out which is all the speed you will ever need in the highways of Kathmandu. Given a condition with light traffic on the highway, preferably off hours, the Dolphin can nip in and out, making huge overtakes on a dime, all done in a way that will have you grinning ear to ear. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Always wear a seatbelt and practice safe driving).

In the urban streets, the Dolphin is one of the easiest cars to drive. So easy in fact that we forgot to drive and fumbled around in the manual diesel car we drove to go home at the end of the day.

The Dolphin is a decently-sized car that isn’t preposterous, plus it comes with sensors on the front and the rear and a crispy 360-degree video camera that does an amazing job of navigating you through the busy inner city streets. When you turn on the 360-degree camera it is like having 4 people looking at all 4 sides of the car and telling you how to manoeuvre in real time. What you see with your eyes and what the camera picks up and shows on the screen is so fast, it is almost instantaneous. This is why driving on a narrow street where people and vehicles come from all sides has never been easier. In our opinion, this is one feature that every car should get.

Another highlight of the Dolphin is the cushy suspension, the MacPherson Struts on the front and Torsion Beam at the back are tuned to be soft which eases out all the bumps without letting the feedback into the cabin. While the disc brakes on all four wheels do an amazing job of stopping the Dolphin on a dime BYD could have given the Dolphin a more aggressive regen braking system for that one pedal driving feel that we missed during this review. Overall, the Dolphin gives you everything you need to make a great pleasurable effortless daily drive from one point to another without any fuss.

Okay let’s talk numbers, the Dolphin brings a 44.9 kWh Blade battery with a permanent magnet synchronous motor that sends 70 kW (94 bhp) and 180 Nm of instant torque to the front wheels that propel the Dolphin to 100 km/h in 12.3 seconds. The Dolphin gets a WLTP range of up to 340 km and supports maximum AC charging (Type 2) of 7.4 kW as well as DC fast charging (CCS) at a maximum rate of 60 kW.

During our testing, the Dolphin under less than ideal driving consumed 2.5 km for every percent battery which resulted in 250 km of driving range. Keep in mind that these range figures are directly related to how you drive the car, it will go far as long as you are gentle.

While we’re still on numbers let’s come to the most controversial number that has been plaguing the Dolphin since launch day. The ground clearance. Cimex Inc., the sole authorised distributor of BYD claims that the Dolphin has 175mm of ground clearance while the Chinese spec Dolphin has a 120mm clearance mentioned on their website. So instead of bombarding Cimex Inc. with aggressive questioning and posting half-baked facts with twisty headlines online we quietly took a measuring tape with us and measured the Dolphin ourselves when we took it for this review.

Measuring all 4 sides of the Dolphin with a good old measuring tape, the lowest part of the Dolphin’s front and back is around 175mm higher from the ground. Bear in mind that these figures are unladen meaning the car was empty during this measurement. The laden or car full of passengers will change depending on the weight of your family. A nearly 400-kilo Nepal Drives review team did drop the car lower but not enough to get out at every bit of bad road. The long wheelbase, however, makes for a shorter breakover angle which could result in underbody scrapes or even getting stuck if you are not careful. We came off unscathed after driving all day on the bad roads of Kathmandu.  So we think that a seasoned driver with a keen eye and understanding of the road ahead will be able to maneuver the Dolphin without any trouble.

A nearly 400-kilo Nepal Drives review team did drop the car lower but not enough to get out at every bit of bad road. The long wheelbase, however, makes for a shorter breakover angle which could result in underbody scrapes or even getting stuck if you are not careful. We came off unscathed after driving all day on the bad roads of Kathmandu.  So we think that a seasoned driver with a keen eye and understanding of the road ahead will be able to maneuver the Dolphin without any trouble.

The Dolphin brings BYD’s full safety suite.

Starting with BYD’s patented Blade battery technology that has survived the nail penetration test also known as the ‘Mount Everest of Battery Testing’ as it is the most rigorous way to test the thermal runaway of batteries. The Blade Battery is the only battery to successfully pass this test. With the safest battery technology in the world underneath the car, the Dolphin also gets 6 airbags, Tyre Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS), ABS with EBD, Electronic Parking Brake (EPB), Electronic Stability Control (ESC), a Traction Control System (TCS), a 360-degree camera and ADAS features like Adaptive Cruise Control, Automatic Emergency Braking System, Rear Collision Warning, Blind Spot Detection, and Rear Cross Traffic Alert, among many others. In short, you don’t need to worry.

You get all of that for a price of Rs. 39,80,000/-

which we think is completely worth it. Like always we advise all our readers and potential buyers to go see the car in person. Make a list of all the cars in this price bracket (which is a lot of cars), shortlist your favourites and schedule a day to see all the cars, preferably drive it should you get a chance.

We believe that 8 times out of 10 you will be quite impressed with what the Dolphin brings to the table. It is the same as any other fish… sorry car, but yet again it is different. You know it is a Dolphin the moment you see it. It looks fresh. It looks sleek, the interior is plush, the drive is effortless, and the safety is excellent. It doesn't wander away from how a traditional car should look and feel and yet it is different in the subtlest of ways.  The BYD Dolphin is one of the best-fitting cars in this urban jigsaw which is why it makes it one of our top recommendations. So ready your fishing rod, use a tasty bait, cast your line, and hook this fish!