I rarely have much good to say about the offering of wannabe lookalike vehicles from China, and I usually have nothing but insults for EVs especially those from the PRC. But no, I have not been smoking some weird stuff in my pipe at lunch time and with that in mind, there’s much to praise about the BYD Yang Wang.
Geely may have come up with a world beating new vehicle called the Yang Wang. It is a short range EV that has a petrol engine, only the petrol engine is what is known as a range booster and acts as a generator and not a drive train.
The idea is that the battery has about 80+ kilometres of range at which point the engine fires up and generates electricity to drive the four electric motors, one on each wheel.
If you accept that EVs are environmentally friendly, and I do not, you may argue that this new EV is not really in the spirit of save the planet and thus is pointless. But then you really are missing the point.
There are a number of advantages that an EV can deliver, such as increased torque leading to more power and faster acceleration. But the one that BYD are touting is the increased safety in water. I know that is somewhat counter intuitive, after all you wouldn’t want to take a bath with a plugged-in toaster.
It is called emergency float mode; during which the wheels will continue turning to power the vehicle which is rated to stay afloat for about 30 minutes. BYD do not recommend you do this though.
In some parts of the world this would be quite a feature. Just this week the Philippines was hit by a huge hurricane that flooded much of the Capital; Taiwan was also pretty hard hit. I am sure that there were any number of motorists in both Manila and Taipei that would have liked to have had a BYD Yang Wang then.
Taking styling cues from the New Land Rover Defender series it is fairly good looking and that is what I really do not like about so many of the PRC automakers, come up with your own designs please, create your own image. Take a look at the video, pretty impressive really.
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