BYD vows to rebuild Aussie trust after build date blunder

BYD is committed to rebuilding trust with Australians following an administrative error resulted in the Chinese car maker offering refunds to more than 1000 customers after it delivered vehicles with incorrect build dates.

An executive for the brand has now confirmed additional affected vehicles have been uncovered, but says the situation is now under control.

Defending the company’s handling of the circa-1500-car build date blunder, BYD Australia’s public relations director, Paul Ellis, told carsales the company is already rebuilding trust with its response.

“We've stood up and we've owned it. We're a Chinese brand that's relatively new to the market, that's creating a level of disruption that hasn't been seen before,” said Ellis.

But BYD’s PR boss said the measure for success is brand trust, not volume.

“If [customers] feel that they're valued and they're being looked after, that's success for us.

“Our success isn't going to be measured by a single sale. It's going to be measured by if that customer has a second purchase, or a third purchase, and that comes down to the ownership experience.”

Ellis says the administrative error occurred when the date the vehicle left the factory in China was accidentally entered as a date of manufacture.

“And that's not correct. That's an admin error; that's a human error,” he said.

“But when the cars arrive in Australia, we upload the information into the Register of Approved Vehicles (RAV) and we upload the correct data. But when our dealer takes an item out of stock, it uses the data that originated and was populated in China.”

The result was Australia BYD dealers ‘innocently’ delivered vehicles built in 2025 as 2026-built cars, said Ellis.

“The fact that we've got on the front foot and it was a manual error – it was an administrative error, we've had to manually check, twice, three times, to make sure that we've captured everyone.

“And our response has been very honest, very transparent, and to some degree, quite generous,” said Ellis.

“Offering to take back a car and replace it, for a car that has no defect. It’s not a defective vehicle. It’s not deficient in any of the compliance because it says [20]25 or [20]26.

“Just on an admin side of things, on the production date of the vehicle, it says 25. But it makes no difference whether it's 25 or 26 in terms of the specification, in terms of compliance.

“But we want to be seen doing the right thing, because someone bought that car in good faith and [thought] it was a 2026 production car… and it wasn't.”

It’s unclear how many other models are affected by the issue, however carsales has received correspondence from the owner of a Denza, suggesting the issue extends beyond BYD models.

Asked whether the build date error could span further – potentially affecting thousands of vehicles recently delivered on its Zhengzhou vessel – Ellis said it had located a few hundred more cases, but doesn’t believe vehicles from the ship are involved.

“There have been additional vehicles that we've identified with the manual checking process that are with customers and we think now we've got a pretty good grip on it.

“Our initial estimate was around 1200-1300 cars but there's a few more hundred on top of that. We think we’ve got it all captured now.”

Ellis said more than 70 per cent of affected owners agreed to accept the $1100 goodwill payment initially offered, but after reassessing the real difference in perceived value by using sources such as Redbook, it upped the payment to $3500.

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