- According to the Nikkei daily, BYD is developing an electric microcar for Europe based on the Japanese kei car Racco.
- It won’t be a copy: the European models will be larger and are supposed to fit under 4.20 m thanks to the planned M1E category.
- The key technology is X-Pack: the inverter and control electronics are built directly into the floor-mounted battery pack.
- The battery is also a structural element of the body, which saves space and money during production.
- Such a model could be manufactured at a new BYD plant in Hungary.
The European market for small electric vehicles has been surprisingly empty in recent years. Automakers prefer to build large SUVs where the money is. BYD plans to enter this gap from an unexpected angle: via Japan. According to the Nikkei daily, cited by the website electrive, the Chinese automaker has chosen its first kei car, the Racco, as the technological base for micro-EVs intended for Europe and other global markets.
What exactly is a kei car and why did BYD start with it
Kei cars are a Japanese specialty that the local government has supported for decades. They are vehicles with strictly limited dimensions. Under the current rules, they may measure a maximum of 3.40 meters in length and 1.48 meters in width without mirrors. So they’re significantly smaller than anything you can buy in Europe: for comparison, the Fiat 500e is 3.63 meters long and 1.68 meters wide.
BYD has entered this segment with the Racco, which it unveiled at the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo last October and sent into sales at the end of July. What’s interesting is that it’s the very first kei car designed by a foreign automaker. It’s manufactured in China in Chang-zhou. Under the hood—or rather, in the floor—it uses a synchronous permanent-magnet motor rated at 47 kW with 160 Nm of torque, an LFP battery with a capacity of 22.4 or 35.84 kWh, and a range of 210 or 320 kilometers. The base price is 2,145,000 yen, which is roughly €11,500.
Racco won’t come to Europe — but its bigger cousin will
A direct transfer of the Racco to our market wouldn’t make sense. A car built for narrow Japanese streets would feel like a toy in Europe and wouldn’t even meet our crash standards in its original form. Therefore, according to Nikkei, BYD plans one or more bigger micro-electric vehicles that take the technology from the Racco—not the body.
The size cap is pretty clear. The European Union is preparing a new vehicle category, M1E, under which cars up to 4.20 meters will fall, and which is expected to get some benefits in the future. BYD already has one vehicle in it: the 3.99-meter-long Dolphin Surf. So new models built on kei car technology would logically be slotted between the Racco and the Dolphin Surf, i.e., into the space where there’s practically nothing electric in Europe today.
X-Pack: a battery that’s also the chassis and distribution unit
The most interesting part of the entire report isn’t the body, but what’s underneath it. The Racco uses a solution that BYD calls X-Pack. In simple terms: the inverter, control units, charging electronics, and the air-conditioning electronics don’t sit separately somewhere under the front hood — they’re built directly into the floor battery. That creates one integrated unit instead of five separate modules connected by cables.
In the Racco, the battery isn’t just an energy tank. It’s a structural LFP Blade battery in a cell-to-body architecture, meaning it forms a load-bearing part of the body and also contributes to absorbing crash energy. For a small car, that’s especially beneficial, because in this class every saved centimeter and kilogram counts twice over.
And that’s the point for Europe. X-Pack can be scaled up for larger platforms in segment A, so BYD could use it to manufacture cheap, easy-to-assemble small electric cars right here in our market. Geography is also encouraging: the company is currently setting up a factory in Hungary, so only a few hundred kilometers from Slovakia. If the plan comes through, we could have an electric city car on the market in the near term that won’t cost as much as a family SUV.
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