Ultra-Cheap BYD Seagull's Optional LIDAR Feature Challenges Western Automakers To Step Up Their Game Once Again

Growing up, I heard all about the space race and how exciting it was to live in a time when the U.S. was building, innovating, and leading the world in technological advancements. The cars were cooler. We sent rockets to the moon. It seemed like a time where we could do anything, but now, those of us in the U.S. are forced to sit back and watch China have all the fun. I mean, heck, CarScoops just spotted a CarNewsChina article that claims you can now order an ultra-cheap BYD Seagull with an optional lidar sensor system for improved driver assistance. A Seagull!

Do I personally have much use for a city car that can mostly drive itself? Not really. Even as the owner of two city cars, I'd much rather live in a city where driving is optional, so I can spend my money on a really fast motorcycle and a wildly impractical sports car. If I was ever going to let a car handle most of the driving for me, it would be on a road trip, and the Seagull doesn't exactly look like the kind of car I'd want to take on a road trip. Or would I? I bet there are plenty of Bolt EUV drivers out there who swear SuperCruise makes it a surprisingly good road-tripper. 

What's so impressive, though, is that BYD just refreshed the Seagull (or the Dolphin Mini/Dolphin Surf, as it's known in some markets), and the new base price is now ¥69,900 or $10,300 at current exchange rates. Add the so-called "God's Eye B" lidar-enhanced driver-assistance system, a feature you can't even get on the fanciest new Tesla, and you'll still pay a mere ¥90,900 or $13,400. In the U.S., a $14,000 budget will get you an 80,000-mile Bolt EUV with SuperCruise, but brand new? Nothing in the U.S. even comes close. 

That said, you never quite get the full story when you run the price of a car through a currency converter, so let's use the Tesla Model Y, one of the few cars sold in significant numbers in both countries, as a rough proxy. If you want all-wheel drive and the long-range battery, you're looking at ¥313,500. While the specs aren't exactly the same, in the U.S., a similar build will cost you $50,630 including destination. Excluding taxes for the sake of simplicity, you can buy about 3.45 lidar-equipped Seagulls for the cost of one long-range Model Y with AWD. 

And if I did my math correctly using the price of a comparable-ish Model Y in the U.S., that lidar-enhanced Seagull's price comes out to a far pricier $14,675. Which is still way, way cheaper than any new car you can buy in the U.S., period.

But surely we aren't talking about a real car here. It probably has a range of like 60 miles and needs four hours to charge in order to make it so cheap, right? Well, according to CarNewsChina, the 2025 BYD Seagull now comes with two battery options. The 30.08 kWh version offers up to 304 km of range, while the 38.88 kWh battery boosts range up to 405 km. That's 190 miles and 252 miles if you just convert kilometers to miles, but China's test cycle is more generous than the EPA's. Doing an extremely rough conversion, in EPA testing, we'd be looking at about 140 miles of range for the base model and somewhere in the 180s.

That's a lot less than the typical U.S. driver would accept from an EV, but we're also used to EVs costing at least $30,000. I'm proof you can live pretty easily with that kind of range, even in a rural suburb without the ability to charge at home, but so far, I haven't been able to convince anyone else to lease a 500e. Then again, if you could get a lidar-equipped Seagull for less than half the price of a 500e, maybe a tiny electric city car starts to make more sense in the U.S. 

In a lot of ways, it would be a perfect first car for a teen. Just not in the U.S., because we don't get Chinese EVs, and the few we're allowed to buy all cost big money unless you find an incredible lease deal. But at least while the U.S. twiddles its thumbs, China gets to have fun building and innovating cool new stuff. Must be nice.