BYD Seal gets beached, owner hopefully now realises AWD isn’t 4WD
If you fancy a spot of beach-driving, something like an Isuzu D-Max or a Toyota LandCruiser seems like a logical choice.
A BYD Seal? Not so much.
Though drive is sent to all four wheels in the top-spec Performance model, there’s just 120mm of ground clearance and no low-range gearing.
That didn’t stop this Seal driver from venturing onto City Beach in Western Australia, with a photo and a video shared by The Bell Tower Times on Facebook.
The photo shows the car at night time and the video shows it during the daytime, indicating there was a long gap between the electric sedan being beached and the subsequent rescue operation.
In the image shared to Facebook, we can also see a Hyundai i30 Sedan stuck in the sand, though it’s unclear what happened to it.
The BYD Seal’s owner replied on one of the Facebook posts with the following explanation:
“This is my car, and I would like to explain why it ended up in that position,” they said.
“Initially, we just wanted to take some photos, but we didn’t expect the front of the car to get stuck. Since this car only has a tow hook in the front, we had no choice but to make a U-turn.
“However, it’s clear that we should have called for assistance as soon as we realized we couldn’t move it.
“We tried to move it all night.”
It’s not the first time we’ve seen a driver take an unsuitable vehicle onto the sand and get stuck, with an Audi RS5 getting bogged on an access track at Bribie Island in Queensland earlier this year.