At the end of May, the Chinese company BYD announced the creation of a premium sub-brand. The cars of the new brand will be the most expensive in the automaker’s line: according to preliminary data, they will cost from 800 thousand to 1.5 million yuan. CarNewsChina had spy photos of the prototype of the future crossover, which is called the “Chinese competitor of Mercedes-Benz G-Class”. Judging by the pictures, he will get an unusual 20-inch screen in the cabin.
BYD has not yet announced the name of the future luxury sub-brand, but Chinese media suggest that it will be called Xingkong (which translates as “starry sky”). The firstborn of the new brand will be an SUV, which will debut in the fourth quarter of this year and will be on the assembly line in the first half of 2023. It is this car that is captured in the latest spy photos.
This is a large SUV with a box-shaped body, a high hood, a massive radiator grille, and a spare tire placed on the fifth door in the manner of a Mercedes G-Class. The design of the car can be described by the word “brutal” and even “utilitarian”, but modern trends have not been avoided – you can notice that it has retractable door handles. CarNewsChina notes that the body is still far from serial – for example, the optics of the prototype seem to have been borrowed from another model.
The interior also looks “raw”, but there are still some interesting details in the photos. For example, the so–far unnamed SUV has a huge integrated multimedia system display with a slightly curved shape – its diagonal is at least 20 inches. The instrument panel is digital, and the ventilation deflectors rise bizarrely above the front panel. The three-spoke steering wheel is truncated from the bottom.
It is known that this model will have a fully electric version, which will be based on the BYD 4.0 platform – this is a new generation architecture, while the current electric cars of the brand are based on the BYD 3.0 “trolley”.
Source: CarNewsChina