It advertises 52km range, which is plenty enough for us for day-to-day driving to be entirely in EV mode.

I work from home and would prefer spending money on things like better school for kids, holidays, house being comfortable and as paid off as possible than on an over priced car as some sort of status symbol (it’s common for people here to choose to spend a fortune on their cars while living in small rented apartments, it’s quite financially stupid).

I also believe that we pay comparatively high taxes on our motor vehicles, our location probably also means that shipping here just costs more, the Sealion 5 is ZAR 570K which is about EUR 29.6K / USD 34.8K

Edit: Seems Sealion 5 price here not necessarily high compared to other countries. It might be BYD “entering the market” and thus putting less of a markup. Hyundai did that here in the early 2010s, but China is a different beast so who knows.