Burgeoning electric car franchise BYD will open its largest "experience" store outside Sydney in the ACT in the next few months as it prepares a volume assault on the national EV market.
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Luke Todd, the managing director of EVDirect, which distributes the Chinese-made BYD brand in Australia, said Canberra was a key market for the company.
"The ACT is obviously very advanced in what it is doing in terms of encouraging electric vehicles," Mr Todd said.
"Canberra is getting the largest BYD Experience Centre anywhere that we are going to build across Australia.
"We're doing a two-storey building and of importance is that this will be the first experience centre that showcases the BYD vehicles and also showcases the BYD Blade battery technology, so it's both a showroom and an education centre, if you like.
"It's also the first experience centre that will incorporate service facilities. So this is going to be our flagship store outside of Sydney. It's bloody exciting."
He said that getting the deal together for the right premises in the right location had taken a deal of time and effort, which had created a few delays, but he expected to have to facility up and running by the end of the year.
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BYD is setting up 11 experience centres across the country. EVDirect will deliver 1500 of its Atto3 cars nationally by the end of October and per capita, the ACT is taking a significant proportion of those vehicles.
Mr Todd said that all BYD models coming to Australia will have ANCAP five-star safety certification, with the Atto3 joined by more models in the next six months.
The Atto3 on sale now will be joined by the cheaper and slightly smaller Dolphin model, with the bigger, richly appointed Seal model, which will target the Tesla Model Y, in the first quarter of next year.
"We've pre-sold 4500 cars already and they will be all delivered by early next year," he said.
Internationally, BYD is the world's largest EV producer ahead of Tesla. Unlike Tesla, it uses its own lithium-iron phosphate battery, instead of the more common lithium-ion.
EVDirect is in a joint venture with Eagers Automotive, Australia's largest car dealership group with a range of retail franchises in the ACT including Canberra Toyota, plus VW, Ford and Honda.
The largest shareholder in Eagers is billionaire Nick Politis, who is the chairman of the Sydney Roosters NRL club.
The Atto3 comes with two battery alternatives. The standard battery version, which has a range of 345km, is $44,381. The Extended range model costs $3000 more and has a range of 470km.
The standard colour is white, and an alternative choice costs an extra $700. The Atto 3 has an eight-year warranty on its battery.
The ACT government does not charge for registration or stamp duty on electric vehicles for the first two years of ownership.
The EVDirect move comes as the Canberra electric car market becomes one of the most fiercely contested in the country.
Although it sells online like BYD, Tesla has a showroom in Civic.
And now even the ACT government is getting involved, albeit in an obtuse way, through its electricity provider arm ActewAGL going into partnership with a company called Vyro.
Vyro is linked directly to the vehicle loan comparison site Driva, which manages the finance.
