Today, we went to Bunnings, Rocklea to help The Beagle Club of Queensland with their sausage sizzle to raise money for beagle rehoming and fostering.
We took the early shift which had the downside of having to get up SUPER EARLY at like 8am (practically still dark wtf) but did mean that after a few hours of sizzling sausages until they’re burnt on the outside and raw on the inside (i.e. perfect), and the onions a blended mix of charcoal pieces and raw (i.e. perfect), we had the rest of the day to go and be productive!
For some reason, my ears heard “be productive” but my brain heard “buy a new car”.
To understand the process of sausage to car, maybe we need some backstory.
All of a few days back, we noticed a pretty sweet car travelling down Beaudesert Road. As we were travelling in separate cars at the time (long story), I rang the better half and said “oi oi whats that sweet looking car to your right?”. She looked out the window and reported back that it was a BYD Seal. “Har har”, I thought to myself, “that’s a silly name for a car…. And BYD? Doesn’t that stand for Build Your Dreams? (spoiler: it does not) Who would buy such a thing? Not me!”
But just how cool that car looked really did stick with me, like Homer and clown college. And frankly everyone HAD stood in my way long enough. I was going to buy an EV.
I’d gone for a quick test hoon in a bloke’s Tesla Model 3 Performance, and that insane acceleration (PS – If you’re police, it was to the speed limit only. If you’re not, then oh man it was so much faster tee hee) had me keen for running a car on batteries, but Elon Musk… well, he was doing Musk Things(tm) and generally making a gigantic arse out of himself (and at the time of writing this post, he still is. Question for future visitors: Is Twitter/X still around?). Given how much of a complete edgelord he was being I just couldn’t bring myself to buy a Tesla. And most other brands were making some pretty basic looking EVs. Polestar? Yeah, nah, not at that price. Kia EV6? The go was there, but it looks like a Barina reversed in to something. Hyundai? Just not enough zoom zoom for the kaching, and looking as plain as a Arnotts Nice biscuit.
But that first glance of a BYD Seal? Phew, lad.
Anyway, my brother had the terrible timing of buying a BYD Atto 3 which he enjoyed very much. With no immediate goals of buying any particular brand of EV, but having an interest in battery powered zoomies, we went for a quick test drive in this one and suddenly the BYD brand was a contender. It was GOOD in there! It might be Chinese and it might be cheap(er) than the others, but it didn’t feel like either of those things. It felt like a nifty little car with plenty of poke, and a fuel cost of $0.00 if you have solar. The image of some poor bloke having a mid-life crisis in his BMW convertible getting smoked up a freeway on-ramp by a car full of lads laughing their heads off was the clincher, and the thought of that naff little “build your dreams” being the last thing he saw as we voltaged our ways in to the distance still brings me a smile.
Anyway, backstory aside…
We figured since there was some time left in the day, maybe we could take a little look at one of those Seals? Just a quick look, nothing more. Just a hands-on, maybe an option to consider for later, type first person inspection of a car we’d only seen briefly.
We headed towards BYD Indooroopilly, but as we got closer realised it was inside the shopping centre?? Sounds like a spectactularly stupid idea to me. We decided to give that a miss and keep going to BYD Fortitude Valley.
After finding a park and wandering in, we got our first look at a Seal in person. We had a couple of minutes to ourselves while sales people were busy with other customers, so we opened and shut the doors, Erin had a quick sit in the drivers seat, and I played with the touch screen a bit.
The conversation with the sales person went something like this:
“Can I help you guys at all?”
“We would like to buy this car please. But white, and the fast version.”
And that was that. We pick up our Seal Performance in 10 days.
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