BYD Dolphin Sport: Hotter electric hatch cancelled

A hotter version of the BYD Dolphin won’t be coming to Australia after all.

The company’s Australian distributor, EVDirect, started reaching out last week to customers who had ordered a BYD Dolphin Sport to advise them their orders had been cancelled.

These customers are being offered a credit towards another BYD product.

“The main reason [for the cancellation] is we’re focused on volume. We had some demand, but it wasn’t a large scale demand from a volume point of view,” EVDirect chief operating officer Mark Harland told CarExpert.

“And we’re looking to bring new vehicles, a couple of new vehicles, into the market ever year.”

“We’ve got the Seal U, that’s coming up on our shores pretty quickly. And we just need to focus on where the volume is,” said recently appointed EVDirect CEO David Smitherman.

Those goals will see the brand enter or expand its presence in key segments, such as mid-sized SUVs and utes.

The Dolphin Sport was a vehicle that had been requested by EVDirect and doesn’t currently exist in other markets.

The distributor had been quiet about it after revealing a single rendering at the local debut of the Dolphin hatchback.

Originally intended to be a special model limited to just 1000 units locally, the Sport was said to feature a unique body kit, ‘Sport Performance tyres’ with ‘Performance styled rims’,

It also promised “tuned sports performance”, suggesting a firmer suspension tune, plus a 0-100km/h time of under seven seconds – quicker than the range-topping Premium, which has a claimed time of 7.0 seconds flat, but not in the same realm as the MG 4 XPower.

When revealed, the Sport carried a price tag of $49,890 before on-road costs, or $5100 more than the Premium.

The Dolphin is currently Australia’s cheapest electric vehicle (EV), priced from $38,890 before on-road costs.

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