I'd love to get a BYD electric in Canada but it seems like they won't be selling for anywhere near as cheap as people are expecting?

Well, depends on how cheap are people expecting?

https://www.byd.international/pricing provides an international (non-BYD affiliated) perspective.

Of course, you can't expect prices as cheap as China. There are shipping costs, local regulation compliance overheads and increased labour costs (for dealers, sales/marketing, servicing etc).

But as an example, Australia is a highly developed country with high labour costs/standards -- similar to Canada in many ways (though closer to China geographically). But without a local car industry to protect, there are no tariffs nor quotas on Chinese cars.

Recently, fierce competition between rival (Chinese) brands (BYD, MG, Geely) has resulted in the BYD Atto 1 EV becoming Australia's cheapest car at A$19,990 or US$14,279 (see: https://www.drive.com.au/news/2026-byd-atto-1-becomes-austra... ).

I expect Canada in the short-term to have prices similar to Europe/UK. With car manufacturers focusing on the premium models (which are the highest priced and hence greatest profit). But there's no reason they can't drop further as trade barriers are lifted and manufacturers are subjected to greater competition.

It's not about being cheap. China has been manufacturing high end goods for the global marketplace for a long time, and has also been doing if for their domestic market. The challenge is that most Canadian and American experiences with Chinese products are with white-label, top tier products like the iPhone built to high quality standards, or dollar store trash manufactured as cheaply as possible to be cheap. Until Apple started moving production, most consumers thought of the IPhone as an American product when it was really American software running on Chinese hardware (I know, it's a simplification). From everything I have read, the BYD cars that would be available here would be competitive products, not the cheapest thing you can buy, which means you should expect to pay for them, but the feature set and value will likely be higher (though I will remain skeptical till I can take one on a test drive here).

I am cautiously optimistic about this, and look forward to that test drive.