BYD Atto 2 review

It’s slightly more conventional compared to its Atto 3 bigger brother (remember those guitar-string speaker straps?) and Dolphin (with its wave-like dashboard), but feels mostly well-built. Your kids might not like it as much, though.

All versions get a heated flat-bottomed steering wheel (with proper buttons and scrolls) and electrically adjustable front seats. Very comfortable front seats, in fact, bucket-like in their design but with plenty of padding - though adjustable lumbar only comes in top Comfort spec.

There’s plenty of ‘vegan’ leather though quite a bit of hard plastic, too. You get a split-level centre console complete with two cupholders and a wireless phone charger whatever version you go for, as well as a flat floor throughout the cabin.

QUIT PROCRASTINATING. WHAT’S THE TECH LIKE?

Sorry. Directly in front of the driver sits an 8.8-inch digital instrument panel. It’s… fine. It permanently shows how much energy you’re using on the left (where the rev counter would normally be) with your speed displayed on the right. All very digital though, no analogue dials here. Down the middle shows your trip info, average speed, mi/kWh and so on. Everything is very much on a need-to-know basis, there’s little imagination here. Easy to use (we’re guessing that’s the point) but a little boring.

In the middle sits the Atto’s party piece, the 12.8-inch rotatable touchscreen. Which you’ll rotate precisely once and then leave in landscape forever more. On the home screen you get a selection of widgets which you can customise to your liking, while down the bottom you get a few shortcut buttons to menus, climate controls and so on. As ever it takes a bit of figuring out, navigating the menus not as easy as it should be. We’d have liked a few more physical buttons.

The centre console does at least have a few – drive modes, hazards, start/stop, regen level, demisters and volume – which all prove very handy. But BYD will say you should be using its voice control system, which you can use to operate the climate control or even open and close the windows. There are also a couple of hidden Easter eggs: swiping up and down with three fingers adjusts the cabin temperature, while swiping from side to side changes the ventilation fan speed.

A MIXED BAG THEN. WHAT’S THE SPACE LIKE?

Plentiful. We’ve already touched on the comfort up top, but rear room is pretty good too, with plenty of foot space under the front seat. That’s helped by its ‘cell-to-body’ construction, meaning that the top cover of the battery pack is the passenger floor. There’s also loads of headroom thanks to the panoramic roof. Few complaints here. 

Further back, the boot measures 400 litres in Boost models, or 450 litres for Comfort models. That positions it pretty much bang in the middle compared to rivals. Fold the seats flat and you’re looking at 1,340 litres and 1,370 litres respectively. And when we say flat we mean flat, thanks to the, er, flat floor.