New BYD Dolphin G is brand’s first car built specially for Europe, and legacy car makers should worry

BYD’s future small and midsize cars will be designed in Europe for Europe, BYD’s executive vice president Stella Li has promised. The first example is the Dolphin G, a ‘B-segment’ supermini which will have its UK market launch at Goodwood Festival of Speed in July.

The Dolphin G “is the first product we are designing purely for Europe, for overseas [markets], because there’s no interest in China,” Ms Li told the Financial Times’ Future of the Car summit. “In the future, we [will] have more and more products based on European tastes and consumer needs, and designed locally here.”

BYD is pushing hard in the European market, putting the finishing touches to its first car factory in Hungary, its supplier base, and establishing an R&D centre in Budapest which will work on European cars. It’s a playbook that copies Kia, whose breakthrough European car in 2006 was the European-designed and built Ceed hatchback. It will cause more headaches for Europe’s legacy car industry, with the Chinese brands continuing to take market share.

BYD Dolphin G details

The Dolphin G sits in the same small car segment as the Atto 2, but unlike that SUV the G will be a five-door hatchback. “We’re missing the biggest volume in the B-segment,” said Ms Li, which she promises the Dolphin G will put right. Expect it to run DM-i hybrid power, as BYD ensures the Toyota Yaris rival can attract combustion engine buyers as well as consumers open to electrified cars.

Pre G, BYDs were designed primarily for Chinese market needs, but Ms Li said the divergence of the two markets required regionalised products, though with shared componentry.    

“We see a bigger gap now to China,” she explained. “The competition is pushing everybody to make cars bigger and bigger, and the chassis wider and wider, and it’s become crazy. You cannot have a bigger car running in Paris, Rome and London. People [here] still prefer a smaller sized car.”

So BYD will split its product development for the B- and C-segments, with cars under 4.3m-long – about the size of a VW Golf – optimised for Europe. Designs will be fine-tuned more for European tastes too, with Ms Li recently undertaking a review at the Budapest R&D centre. “I saw the next three years’ [cars]: their [look] is based more on European design, no longer Chinese,” she said.

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