
#Hatch rest plus review full
Full disclosure: the cars on the international launch of the Dolphin were all set in some sort of factory transport mode which doped the accelerator and delivery to comatose levels. The Dolphin’s biggest issue comes with the driving. TG suspects that most owners will be the stay-at-home charge types though, so that’s not quite the issue that some people would have you believe. Still, the better pair of grades also get 11kW AC, so if you find a higher-power three-phase supply, it’ll charge up respectably. A sleight-of-hand with the stats there from BYD. With 88kW DC, you’re looking at 29 minutes from 30-80 per cent, which sounds fine, but most competitors manage half an hour-ish from 10-80 per cent. This is all good stuff.Īs far as charging goes, it’s a bit average. There’s also advanced battery conditioning that could see a 15 per cent increase in thermal efficiency in winter, which will make a huge difference when trying to tease a little more real-world range out of the thing in a frigid February. There’s a neat eight-in-one electric powertrain that packages the VCU, battery management, power distribution unit, drive motor and its controller, transmission, DC-to-DC converter and onboard charger into one unit, as well as a heat pump and vehicle-to-load system as standard. The Dolphin’s ‘Blade’ battery is an LFP unit, so different chemistry to most (but not all, the standard-range MG4 has an LFP battery), and it’s demonstrably safer, capable of heavier cycles and has better thermal stability (which means more efficiency).

BYD is a Big Company back in China, with reams of battery expertise. There’s more good stuff in terms of the hardware, too. It’s got decent range and a clever battery though! If you want the big panoramic roof though you have to head for the top-spec Design, and it’s worth doing: it really brightens up the interior, unsurprisingly.

And the front seats are really very comfy - bonus points for that. In general though, it’s got a nice mix of textures and shapes - including ‘vegan leather’ which is, erm… plastic. The boot isn’t massive at 345 litres, but it’s big for this size of car. Head, leg, elbow room, as well as plenty of volume for backseat passengers. The gear selector is a vertical wheel on the centre console - feels a bit cheap, that - but everything else seems nice enough, and space is good.Īctually space is quite impressive, given the footprint of the car.

Even the doorhandles are swoopily-shaped like a dolphin’s flipper, which is kitschy in a weird way.

The pink car has a very pink dash, for instance, which makes it feel largely like driving around inside Barbie’s brain.
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It’s a playful interior with a big rotating 12.8-inch touchscreen in the middle (although the software is a bit all over the place), little driver’s display up front and some very interesting shapes and colours, most carried through from the outside. TG says it definitely looks safe… … until you get to the inside.Īh yes, as with the bigger-brother Atto 3 SUV, the Dolphin seems to compress all the creativity into the cabin. It’s also supposed to look ‘safe and welcoming’ while exuding a sense of ‘fun and agility’. That side profile is supposed to resemble a leaping dolphin, by the way, but it doesn’t. There are those among us who will no doubt love the interesting pink.
