There’s an inimitable appeal to proper, big, chunky 4x4s, as distinct from car-based and road-biased SUVs.
Vehicles such as the Toyota Land Cruiser and the Land Rover Defender enjoy healthy sales not merely because they’re avatars for the rugged adventurer we all imagine ourselves to be, but because, unlike a softie SUV, they can actually back that image up with genuine mountain-climbing, desert-crossing, river-fording capability.
Now the likes of the Land Cruiser and the Defender have a new rival and one that’s inching ever closer to an on-sale reality in Ireland.
BYD, which has established itself very firmly here as one of the best-known and already best-respected Chinese car makers, has more than just the BYD brand in its stable.
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The Chinese giant also has Denza, a luxury brand it started initially in co-operation with Mercedes-Benz, although the Germans have since sold their share.
Denza used the Goodwood Festival of Speed show – effectively the British motor show these days – to present the models kicking off its right-hand drive line-up.
One of those will be the Denza Z9, a sleek fastback luxury saloon, rather similar in concept and shape to the Porsche Panamera, and which can be had as either a fully electric car or as a plug-in hybrid with some truly staggering performance figures.
The 965hp EV version boasts a range of up 630km (although that’s on the lenient Chinese CLTC test, not the tougher WLTP version), while the plug-in hybrid model mixes two-litre turbo petrol power with three electric motors for a total power output of 870hp, an electric range of 201km on a charge and a combined electric-and-petrol range of 1,000km.
That plug-in hybrid system, called DM-i by BYD and Denza, is seen as more critical than ever to success in a European market that’s still a little EV-phobic, and – not inconsequentially – doesn’t add the same swingeing tariffs to plug-in hybrids made in China that it does to fully-electric models.
Luxury cars are something of a tricky sell in the Irish market for any company that’s not able to pin a German badge to the boot lid, and while Denza may have a little bit of Mercedes involvement in its background, that’s probably not going to be enough on its own to swing Irish buyers in its direction.
The Fengchangbao Bao 5 – a product of one of BYD’s other sub-brands – might, though.
Fangchengbao roughly translates as Leopard, and the brand has been designed to take on the likes of Land Rover, the Toyota Land Cruiser, and Mercedes and other premium SUVs.
It’s now been confirmed for the UK market, and therefore with right-hand drive, as the Denza B5, which is at least easier to pronounce, although Denza’s translation – “rising power and momentum” – isn’t quite as cool as Leopard.
A rugged and tough Land Cruiser rival may well play better to Irish market proclivities – imagine the reaction to one of these at the Ploughing Championship – than a low-slung luxury challenger, especially in a market that’s rapidly cottoning on to the potential of a good PHEV.
Land Rover sells almost no Defenders here that aren’t the P400e plug-in model, while we’re still waiting to see if Toyota can create a PHEV Land Cruiser. It leaves a potential open goal for BYD and Denza.
An open goal towards which the B5 is currently slithering and sliding, apparently grip-less. Tyres really are everything.
I know we’re probably all sick to the back teeth of being reminded to check our pressures, and ensure that we buy from a reputable brand and so on, but just as manners maketh man, so tyres maketh car. The contact patch is the most important part of any vehicle.
Here, on a tight and twisty Chinese test track, is our first chance to sample the B5, and the unbroken grey cloud is chucking a whole monsoon’s worth of water down as we try to coax the big 4x4 around a lap.
The B5’s 1.5-litre turbo petrol engine and two electric motors produce a total power output of 505kW, which equates to 670hp, along with 760Nm of torque. Its quoted 0-100km/h time is just 4.8 seconds, and this is a large SUV with an off-road-friendly separate chassis, all-wheel drive, and chunky tyres.
Ah, yes. The tyres. Globally, the Bao 5 is supposed to come with either chunky BF Goodrich tyres for off-roading, or sportier Michelin rubber for on-road use.
Our test car came with neither, instead wearing a set of Thai-made Giti (soft G, apparently) tyres that have been clearly designed around long life and hard compounds rather than providing actual traction or grip while cornering.
It doesn’t help that, in spite of its adaptive suspension, the B5 is really quite softly sprung so not only does it roll copiously around corners, it also lifts noticeably at the front, and dives like a dying swan under brakes.
Precise and agile it is not. It is comfy all right, although the smooth test track surface isn’t giving the optional adaptive hydraulic suspension much to worry about. Unsurprisingly, the B5 feels, in these circumstances, like putting a cow on roller skates and asking it to tackle the Cresta Run.
We spend two laps of the test track desperately trying to quell the Bao 5’s understeer, which seems to get worse and worse as the tyres both heat up and are reprofiled into 50p pieces by the constant dragging across the tarmac.
I suspect on regular roads, on proper tyres, the Bao 5 would provide a relatively comfy, loping driving experience entirely in keeping with the set-square styling. I also suspect that off-road, and again on the right rubber, it would be pretty well unstoppable, with vast ground clearance and plenty of wheel articulation.
There’s another mystery: why does a car with supposedly 670hp feel so lacklustre on track? A V8-engine Defender, with less power, feels positively explosive but the Bao 5 just ... accelerates.
There’s no adjective to use here, really. It isn’t quite slow and it isn’t quite fast. It just ... goes. There is a theoretical electric-only range of more than 125km on a full charge, but that’s according to the generally more easy-going Chinese official test. Figure on getting a real-world 80km or so, if you’re careful.
Hopefully, by the time the B5 reaches Ireland, it will have been given a decent set of tyres, and someone will have turned the electric motors up full. If all of that happens, it may well have a chance of giving both the Land Cruiser and the Defender an upset.
The cabin seems well appointed – big screens, a chunky steering wheel, equally chunky buttons and gear selector. It’s arguably not as stylish as the interior of a Land Rover Defender, but about on a par with that of the Toyota Land Cruiser, with similar levels of initial quality (although, obviously, its long-term reliability and solidity remain untested).
The front seats are wonderfully comfortable and soft, and you sit high with a terrific view out of an apparently almost vertical windscreen. Space in the back is copious, and the boot measures almost 1,000 litres if you stack it to the roof, so the B5 is certainly pushing all of the right practicality buttons, although the big side-hinged tailgate, which holds the spare wheel, will make it an awkward thing to load in tight spaces.
On the outside, it looks really appealing with upright, square-rigged styling, and some obvious nods to the look of the Defender, the Land Cruiser, and around the front end the US-market-only Ford Bronco. Derivative? A bit, but also handsome.
The range will grow, with smaller Chinese-market Bao 3 and larger Bao 8 models coming along in due course, although all we can tell you about those just is that they share similarly rugged styling with the B5, and will use electrified or fully-electric power trains. There is another car in the line-up, though.
Alongside the three chunky SUVs, Fangchengbao is also going to make – for real – a slinky, low, two-seat electric supercar with no roof, no windscreen, and doors like a Lamborghini.
A rival to the likes of the Ferrari Monza Monoposto, this Super 9 model — des–gned by former Audi designer Wolfgang Egger — loo–s like a ballet slipper next to Timberland boots compared with its 4x4 brothers, but it sure does display the engineering depth and breadth of this new brand and the vast BYD corporation that backs it.
As for Ireland? Well, Denza’s first right-hand drive models will arrive in the UK in “early 2026″, but “as for Ireland, we have no confirmation on the timelines just yet”, a BYD spokesperson tells The Irish Times.
