Advert
The BYD Dolphin Surf is a game-changing EV: starting from just £18,650, the electric city car is well designed, great to drive, and very efficient in real-world driving.
BYD was a largely unknown car brand in the UK just two years ago. We’ve since had the ATTO 3, Dolphin, Seal and Sealion 7 EVs. Now we have the Dolphin Surf, probably BYD’s most significant EV in the UK to date, because it starts at just £18,650 – but has BYD also managed to deliver a great car at this affordable end of the market?
The Dolphin Surf is well designed – particularly in comparison to some of its competitors. It looks modern and stylish, and those headlights look like they could be from a Lamborghini. The interior is also well designed, predictably with the dashboard having as its main feature a 10-inch central touchscreen, which can be rotated electronically to swap between landscape and portrait formats, together with a wireless charging tray for your mobile phone, angled towards the driver, being the main feature of the centre console.
The Dolphin Surf may only be 3,990mm long, but it has lots of rear legroom, and a decent-sized boot for this size of car: 308 litres, or 1,307 litres with the rear seats folded. Perhaps no surprise, the Dolphin Surf is a four-seater rather than a five-seater.
The Dolphin Surf is available as a three-model line-up. The Active entry-level model has a 30kWh battery and a 65kW electric motor. The Boost model has a larger 43.2kWh battery and the same 65kW electric motor. The top of the range Comfort model has the larger 43.2kWh battery and a more powerful 115kW electric motor.
The Dolphin Surf is based on BYD’s e-Platform 3.0 and features the company’s Blade battery. This uses Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) as a cathode material which has greater resistance to extreme temperatures and can withstand more charge and discharge cycles. It’s 100% free of cobalt, a material that raises ethical and environmental concerns in the mining industry. BYD claims its Blade battery, which is part of the structure of the vehicle, has a better driving range, is safer, and has a longer lifecycle.
The Dolphin Surf also features what BYD says is the world’s first mass-produced 8-in-1 electric powertrain.
The Dolphin Surf is primarily designed for use as a city car, and it excels in this role. It’s light for an EV, weighing just 1,390 kg, which results in the car being agile and fun to drive. The 0-62 mph acceleration time of 9.1 seconds may not sound particularly rapid, but it feels faster than this in real-life, in fact with the instant torque from the electric motor it feels like a mini-sports car.
With the battery low down in the car, a wheel at each corner, and sharp steering, handling is fun. The Dolphin Surf is front-wheel drive; many front-wheel drive EVs have a wheelspin and torque steer problem, but the traction control is well judged, allowing some slip of the front wheels but not too much, and the system doesn’t over-encroach on the car’s responsiveness.
But perhaps the best news is the ride quality, which is excellent – something that is really important when living with a car on our potholed urban roads.
So for a city car with prices starting at under £20,000, you’d expect it to be less than ideal for long motorway journeys. Wrong. It was with some trepidation that we set out from Manchester on a 184-mile journey to Reading (and back), but it soon became apparent that the Dolphin Surf is perfectly capable on motorways; quiet, refined, comfortable, and more stable at motorway speeds than most other city cars that we’ve driven (and keep reading to find out about the car’s real-world driving range).
There are three drive modes: Eco, Normal and Sport. Unusually, and helpfully, when you re-start the car, it stays in the same drive mode that you left it in.
The Dolphin Surf has what initially appears to be a strange gear selector: a rotary dial on the right-hand end of a row of similar controls below the touchscreen, with a very hard to see ‘P’ button on the right, however when you’re used to it, this is actually a surprisingly-convenient gear selector. To change the level of brake regeneration – the choices are standard or high – you need to delve into the touchscreen.
The other controls in the row of switches to the left of the gear selector, including items such as media volume, drive modes and air conditioning, need to be rotated up or down to be operated, and would benefit from clearer graphics.
Above these switches is the central touchscreen; along the bottom of this is a row of buttons, mainly for climate controls, which are not as clear as the shortcuts on most competitors’ infotainment systems. One of the icons has three white lines – it’s not immediately obvious what this symbol is for, but it turns out it’s for the cabin temperature – and strangely you never get a numerical read-out of the actual cabin temperature, just a series of lines.
Virtually all Chinese cars that we’ve driven are too over-intrusive in terms of driver assistance systems, which results in huge amounts of beeping. The Dolphin Surf certainly isn’t the worst, but driving from Manchester to Reading and back initially resulted in an almost constant barrage of commands to “keep your eyes on the road”. A lot of this was likely to be due to frantic surveying of the touchscreen menus and sub-menus to look for the button to switch off the “keep your eyes on the road” commands. Normally this can be switched off in an ADAS sub-menu, but somewhat strangely in the Dolphin Surf this is under the sub-menu of ‘cabin perception’ (who knew?!).
This was actually explained by a super-helpful BYD employee at an event in Reading, who also mentioned that an over-the-air update might be due in order to reduce the sensitivity of this driver attention feature; we don’t know if this happened, but “keep your eyes on the road” soon ceased to be an issue. If this was adjusted by an over-the-air update, this is a perfect example of how BYD – and many other Chinese manufacturers – improve features on their cars in days or weeks rather than months or years.
The helpful BYD employee also showed us how to change the cabin temperature and fan by sliding three fingers up/down and across the screen respectively, as well as how to select shortcut controls by swiping down the screen. All clever stuff, but we are concerned that owners of second-hand Dolphin Surfs may never know about these secret ways to control the car.
The expectation was that a car in this price range would have limited steering wheel and seat adjustment, resulting in a poor driving position. However as well as both reach and height adjustment of the steering wheel, our test car had electric seat adjustment, so it was possible to get a good driving position.
The BYD Dolphin Surf Comfort has an official WLTP combined electric driving range of 193 miles. As mentioned above, we drove the Dolphin Surf from Manchester to Reading, a distance of 184 miles. The EV managed to complete this distance all on one charge, with five miles of range left at the end, therefore delivering a real-world range of 189 miles – just four miles less than the official range figure – at an average of 65 mph. This is impressive, but what was even more impressive is that it repeated these figures exactly on the way back from Reading to Manchester: the 184-mile journey was completed on one charge with five miles remaining, once again giving a real-world range of 189 miles.
One issue was that when the car got down to 10 miles of remaining range, it stopped showing how many miles were left, and just displayed a dash. The one time when you really want to know exactly how many miles you have left is when the range is below 10 miles, so, BYD, if you can tweak that please…
Tied in with the impressive real-world driving range was impressive real-world efficiency. The Dolphin Surf Comfort’s official WLTP consumption figure is 3.88 miles/kWh, which isn’t class-leading, but our real-world driving experience exceeded this figure. Really helpfully, the Dolphin Surf has a large display of the car’s real-time efficiency in front of the driver, and it was showing an average of 4.6 miles/kWh at 65mph on the motorway, which is more along the lines of what we would expect, and we averaged 5.2 miles/kWh in urban driving.
The Dolphin Surf has a maximum DC rapid charging rate of 85 kW, which is fairly typical of cars in this class, and BYD says this will give you a 10% to 80% charge in 30 minutes. The Active model has a maximum DC charging rate of 65 kW, which is on the low side; we’d prefer to see a minimum DC charging rate of 100 kW for all EVs.
Three-phase 11kW AC charging is standard across the range, allowing a 0% to 100% charge in three and a half hours for the Active model, or five hours for the Boost and Comfort models.
The Dolphin Surf has a vehicle-to-load (V2L) function, allowing you to power domestic electrical appliances using a V2L power cord in the car’s charging port.
The Dolphin Surf is available as a three-model range.
The entry-level Active model has a 30 kWh battery delivering 137 miles of range with a 65kW / 88PS electric motor giving a 0-62 mph time of 11.1 seconds and is priced at £18,650.
The Boost model has a 43.2 kWh battery with a range of 200 miles, a 65kW/88PS electric motor, and a 0-62 mph time of 12.1 seconds and is priced at £21,950.
The top-of-the-range Comfort model, as tested, has a 43.2 kWh battery giving a range of 193 miles, with a 115kW/156PS electric motor, and a 0-62 mph time of 9.1 seconds, and is priced at £23,950.
The Comfort model features a 360-degree camera, LED headlights, rear privacy glass, side-mirror footlights, heated front seats and wireless smartphone charging.
Four exterior paint colours are available: Lime Green (standard) (although we’d say this is more yellow than green), and options of Polar Night Black, Apricity White, Ice Blue (all cost an extra £650).
The Dolphin Surf battery has an 8-year warranty which covers 125,000 miles and its state of health being at least 70%.
The BYD Dolphin Surf is a game-changing EV. With prices starting at under £20,000, it has stylish design and a driving experience that you would expect from a larger, more expensive car. With its compact size, agility, responsive acceleration, and comfortable ride quality, it excels in urban driving. However our drive from Manchester to Reading and back proves that it’s also perfectly competent on long journeys. The driving range of up to 200 miles is good for an EV of this size, as is the 85 kW DC rapid charging rate – although we’d prefer a minimum of 100 kW. The over-sensitive driver assistance systems can be switched off, but we’d like to see these “tuned-down” for UK drivers. Perhaps the main takeaway is that BYD has only been selling its current range of cars in the UK for a couple of years, yet after this very short time it has given us one of the best, and most affordable, electric city cars. The BYD Dolphin Surf is awarded a Green Car Guide rating of 9 out of 10.
Drive an EV for less than you think with Select Car Leasing 
Save 20-50% on an EV through salary sacrifice with The Electric Car Scheme 
ClearWatt supports buyers, sellers and owners of EVs with app-based battery health testing and detailed EV data insights available for every used EV in the UK. Take the stress out of buying a used EV with ClearWatt and save 10% on all their products with promo code “GCG10”. 
Zapmap: UK's No.1 EV charging points app 2025. Zapmap helps EV drivers search for EV chargers, plan longer journeys and pay for charging. 
With Pod, you're in good hands. With over 15 years of EV charging experience, drivers trust Pod to keep their EVs charged and ready to go. 
Paul Clarke, GreenCarGuide Editor
