If you’ve been keeping an eye on the electric car scene, you know range is the holy grail. Everyone wants to crack that elusive number: the point where your EV can drive as far as a gas-powered car — maybe even farther — without stopping to charge.
Enter the Yangwang U7, the latest luxury sedan from BYD’s high-end brand. On paper, it’s a game-changer, boasting more than 1,000 kilometers (about 620 miles) of range on a single charge. But as with most numbers too good to be true, there’s a catch.
There are basically two ways to stretch how far an electric car can go:
BYD clearly went with option two. The new Yangwang U7 packs a 150 kWh battery — an absolute giant by industry standards. The battery alone weighs roughly 926 kilograms, or about the same as a small car. Add everything up and the U7 tips the scales at a staggering 3.2 tons. This is not your nimble city commuter — it’s a quiet, heavy, all-electric cruise ship built for the highway.
BYD says the new U7 can go beyond 1,000 kilometers per charge. Sounds amazing, right? But before you plan that cross-country drive, it’s worth noting that this number comes from the CLTC, China’s domestic testing standard — one that’s known for being generous.
Under Europe’s stricter WLTP testing, experts estimate the range could fall somewhere between 850 and 900 kilometers instead. Still remarkable, but not quite the four-digit bragging right BYD loves to highlight. It’s a bit like a phone manufacturer claiming a battery lasts three days… as long as you don’t actually use it.
The idea of fitting a car with nearly a ton of battery sounds a little absurd. It’s heavy, expensive, and arguably not the most efficient way to extend range. But for BYD, one of the world’s biggest battery makers, that might be the point.
This car feels less like a practical solution and more like a statement — a flex that says, “Look at what we can do.” It shows how far battery technology has come, but also how far it still has to go before we find the sweet spot between power, efficiency, and sustainability.
The Yangwang U7 is BYD’s shot at the ultra-premium EV club, rubbing shoulders with the Mercedes EQS, BMW i7, and Lucid Air. And in China’s fast-moving electric vehicle market, where BYD is already a dominating force, the urge to show off makes sense.
But stuffing a car with that much battery raises big questions:
In other words, the math on “green mobility” starts to blur a little.
So sure, on paper, the U7 could get you from Stockholm to Paris without a single pit stop. But in practice, it might represent something different — a turning point in the luxury EV arms race, where the quest for range becomes less about necessity and more about sheer ambition.
Whether that’s progress or just over-the-top engineering depends on how you see it. What do you think — a sign of things to come, or electric overkill at its finest?