Two years ago I ended a post about a refused warranty claim with a suggestion: go and look for BYD in the published reliability rankings, and see what you find. At the time you found very little.
That has changed. In Auto Express’s Driver Power 2026 owner survey BYD finishes 16th of 30 manufacturers with 84.69%, up from last place the year before. It is still absent from iSeeCars’ longest-lasting-brands study, which ranks 32 brands on United States data.
What has not changed is the part I care about most in the sixth year of owning this car, at 60,000 km. I still like how it drives. I still cannot tell you it will be competently serviced where you live, and that is the thing I would spend an evening researching before I signed anything.
What did the reliability rankings say about BYD in 2024?
In November 2024 I wrote that looking for BYD in the reliability rankings took five minutes and that the result might surprise you. The surprise was that there was nothing to find: the brand was too new to the markets those surveys sample, so it sat outside them.
I used that as an argument about warranty length. Toyota builds cars that rank near the top of those same surveys and offers three years. BYD was offering six. My reading then was that a long warranty is cheap to promise if the promise is not the thing being tested, and I had just spent six months waiting for an answer about a headlight on a car with 40,000 km on it, serviced on schedule at an official dealer. The answer, when it came, was no.
That post is still here, and I have not softened it: the full warranty story is in the post about the claim being refused.
But an argument that rests on a brand being unranked has a shelf life, and mine has expired.
Where does BYD rank in the 2026 reliability surveys?
According to Auto Express, BYD finishes 16th out of 30 manufacturers in its Driver Power 2026 survey, with an owner satisfaction score of 84.69%. Auto Express describes this as the brand’s second appearance in the survey and says it is a large improvement on the year before, when BYD finished last.
Driver Power is an owner satisfaction survey rather than a defect count. Auto Express says it covers ten ownership categories, from reliability and running costs through to infotainment and how the car drives. That distinction matters when reading the result: it is what owners report about living with the car, not a laboratory measure.
Within those categories Auto Express reports a mixed picture. It gives BYD a third place in the Powertrain category, describing the EV and hybrid setups as powerful and smooth, and a top-five result for Economy and Running Costs. Against that it reports owners finding the driving experience fidgety and unresponsive, and singles out infotainment, driver-assistance technology, the over-zealousness of the safety systems, and air-conditioning controls being relegated to the touchscreen.
Sixteenth of thirty is the middle of the table, and I would not read much into the position itself. What the result actually tells you is that BYD now has enough owners in one large European market for anybody to measure it, which was not true when I wrote about this in 2024.
Why is BYD absent from the iSeeCars longevity study?
BYD does not appear among the 32 brands in the iSeeCars longest-lasting-car-brands study, and the study’s own method explains why. iSeeCars says it analysed data for over 174 million cars and built a model predicting the chance that a given brand’s vehicles reach 250,000 miles, using odometer readings from the United States market.
A study built on how far used cars have actually travelled can only rank brands whose used cars are on those roads in numbers. iSeeCars puts Toyota, Lexus, Honda and Acura at the top, above what it gives as a 4.8% average chance of reaching that mileage. That is a measurement of cars sold years ago and driven since.
So what the absence tells you is something about the dataset rather than about the car. That is the mistake I came closest to making myself in 2024, and it cuts both ways: nobody can tell you a BYD will reach 250,000 miles either, because nothing has been measured for long enough to say.
| 2024, when I first wrote about this | 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Auto Express Driver Power, manufacturers | brand not in the survey | 16th of 30, 84.69% |
| Driver Power, previous year | — | last place in 2025, per Auto Express |
| iSeeCars longest-lasting brands | brand not in the study | still not among the 32 ranked |
| Number of European owner surveys BYD appears in, to my knowledge | none | at least one |
| My own car | 5 years, 50,000 km | sixth year, 60,000 km |
Every figure in the first three rows is Auto Express’s or iSeeCars’ own, from the pages linked at the bottom. The last two rows are mine.
Does a mid-table ranking match what owning one is actually like?
A mid-table finish matches my own sixth year with this Han about halfway, and the half it misses is the whole reason I keep writing about the car.
The half the survey gets right is the driving. In my own words from 2025, before any of the rankings had anything to say: quiet, smooth, quick off the line, and surprisingly comfortable. Nearly six years and 60,000 km later that has not changed, and Auto Express giving the powertrain a podium finish reads to me as owners noticing the same thing I did.
What it misses is everything that happens after something breaks. During one wet season the cruise control stopped working, the car reported a door that was shut, and once it decided I was pressing the brake and the accelerator at the same time. A cabin leak I pointed out was not found by the dealer; I fixed it myself. And a cabin filter came back from a service fitted against the arrow printed on it.
Fully inverted.
On a directional CN95 HEPA element, which only filters one way round 🙂
What I wrote in 2025 still stands: the local service centre had no real BYD training or documentation, no process, no factory guidance, just guesswork.
A filter fitted backwards says nothing about how BYD builds cars. It says a great deal about what happens to one afterwards, and I have not found an owner survey that asks about that separately.
I am not the only one who noticed. A Belgian owner replying to my post put it this way: most dealers there had been selling BYD for less than a year, and the people working on the cars lacked training, experience and parts. That is one comment from one owner, not data — but it is the same shape as my experience, in a different country.
What should you actually check before buying a BYD?
Before buying a BYD in Europe, spend an evening researching the specific dealer who would be servicing the car, not just the brand’s ranking.
The rankings are worth reading now, which they were not two years ago, and Driver Power in particular tells you what owners in one large European market make of living with these cars. Read it. Then go looking for the thing it does not cover: what people in your own city say about the BYD service centre your car would end up in.
Search for reviews of that specific dealer, and read the bad ones properly rather than counting stars. What you want is an owner describing a repair that went wrong and what happened next. Then ask the dealer directly how long they have sold the brand and how many of their technicians are actually trained on it. Ask what happens when a problem has to go back to the factory for an answer, because on my car that is where the months went.
I like this car and I am not steering you away from it. But over nearly six years the thing that decided what owning it was like had nothing to do with a reliability score, and no score would have shown it to me. It was whether anybody within driving distance could fix the thing.
Happy with the machine, unhappy with the service and repair around it. That is the honest summary approaching six years, and it has been the summary since the first couple of easy years ran out. The month-to-month version is in the five-year review of living with this car in Europe, and the service side specifically is in the post comparing dealers in Portugal, Belgium and Japan.
What do reviews of your local BYD dealer actually say? I would genuinely like to know whether Portugal is the outlier here or the norm.
FAQ
Is BYD in the reliability rankings now?
Yes, in at least one. Auto Express places BYD 16th out of 30 manufacturers in its Driver Power 2026 owner satisfaction survey, with 84.69%. Auto Express says this is the brand’s second appearance and a large improvement on the previous year, when it finished last.
Where does BYD rank in Driver Power 2026?
Sixteenth of thirty manufacturers, at 84.69%, according to Auto Express. Auto Express reports a third place for BYD in the Powertrain category and a top-five result for Economy and Running Costs, against criticism of the driving experience, the infotainment, the driver-assistance systems and air-conditioning controls placed on the touchscreen.
Why does BYD not appear in the iSeeCars longevity study?
iSeeCars says its study analysed over 174 million cars and predicts the chance of reaching 250,000 miles from United States odometer data, ranking 32 brands. BYD is not among them. As I read it that is a limit of the dataset rather than a finding about the car: a study of how far used cars have already travelled can only rank brands with used cars on those roads.
Is a BYD Han reliable after nearly six years?
Mine drives as well as it did when it was new — quiet, smooth, quick off the line and comfortable — after nearly six years and 60,000 km. The failures I have had were electrical and clustered around wet weather, and the harder problem has been getting them diagnosed rather than the failures themselves.
What is the difference between an owner satisfaction survey and a reliability study?
An owner satisfaction survey such as Driver Power asks owners what they think of living with the car across categories including reliability, running costs and infotainment. A longevity study such as iSeeCars’ measures recorded mileage on used cars. They answer different questions, and a brand can be present in one and absent from the other.
What should I check before buying a BYD in Europe?
Read the owner surveys, then research the specific dealer who would service your car: reviews of that service centre, how long they have sold the brand, how many technicians are trained on it, and how long parts and factory answers take. On my car that was the part that decided the ownership experience, and it does not appear in any ranking.
Sources
Two published sources are cited above and both were read directly for this post.
The 2026 manufacturer ranking, BYD’s position and score, its previous-year result and its category results are Auto Express’s own, from Driver Power 2026: best car manufacturers. The longevity study’s method, its 32 ranked brands and the absence of BYD from them are iSeeCars’ own, from the longest-lasting car brands study. Where I interpret either of them, I say that it is my reading.
My 2024 post named a third source, J.D. Power. I have deliberately not cited it here, because I could not open its own page for this study and I am not going to link a page I have not read in a post about what is and is not verifiable.
Everything about my own car — the mileage, the failures, the service history and the filter — is mine, and the long versions are linked in the text.
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