Sealion 6 vs Sealion 7 as family car

Trickle charging overnight will be more than enough for most daily driving. I can’t comment on the Sealion but we charged our Tesla for 2 years that way. We only upgraded to a wall charger because we got a free one with our second EV.

I would avoid a full ev if you don’t have a reliable home charging solution. Having said that, I have the SL7 and love it.

As a family of 5, I can’t recommend SL7 enough. In South Africa they included a full spare wheel, and when we do long trips that goes in, plus bikes, plus bags for all 5 of us (we obviously utilise the front boot as well). While I absolutely cannot see out the back (I use the rear camera) everything fits, everyone is comfortable and the drive is AMAZING

I have a 7 and use a trickle charge during the day with solar. 9am-3pm gives gives about 12 pct from memory which is more than enough for school/ sport run Fully charge form 10pct to 100 cost $50 at a charge fox quick charge and takes just over a hour, just enough for a sneaky pint. The slower chargers in paid car parks are about $20 to fully charge but take 4-5 hours or so. We use them if we ever go into town for the day I thought the rear view mirror would be an issue but it’s not as cameras more than make up for it but it does have a decent blind spot left hand side (aust so rh drive) wich is annoying for turning right and stopping in the middle. I adjusted by altering my angle when i do it. Coupe shape does reduce boot space a bit but I dont do a lot of travelling so no issues and I fit a single pram and food shopping with no issues. Nice Byd or other websites have bits n stuff inc sunglass holders for the 7 I’ve bought floor mats and sun shades through them and they good quality

Regarding charging, it just need a tweak in mindset as compared to life before EV. I don’t have a charger at home but whenever we go to malls for meals or grocery run, we’d find a charger to top up. If it’s DC it’s a bonus since it’ll be much faster. If it’s AC then we take whatever we get. Just changing this habit makes the transition easy. And I’ve a Sealion 7 with two boys 13-11. The space behind is more than enough as they grow up. Regarding the rear windscreen - it doesn’t matter as much as you said there are collision avoidance sensors and cameras to help.

Are you in Australia? We went with the 7 because the government incentives when leasing it means it worked out cheaper than the 6 over a 5 year lease. ALL lease costs can be pre tax, no FBT on electric cars, and you can roll the running costs, charging costs and insurance costs into the lease which so end up tax free. It feels like a big car, it’s WIDE (on the outside). It’s got pretty damn good cabin space, loads of leg room for the back seats (perhaps not too important to you). But the usable boot space is pretty damn small. We fit enough gear in it, but we’re only a family of 3. The frunk is good to store some charging cables, a first aid kit and a picnic blanket and that’s about it. Vision out the back is pretty average, and obviously if you load up the boot you can easily obstruct the vision further, but as you say the cameras take care of that and it’s not a big deal. The ‘safety features’ dinging at you all the time do get annoying particularly because the same ding can mean half a dozen different things and you’ve usually got no idea which thing it is that it’s upset about this time. But I think most modern cars are like that these days, it’s certainly not unique to the Sealion 7. No openable sun roof pisses me off, but my missus hates them so she’s happy. We got a charger installed at home, and did the whole home battery thing at the same time. But we lived with the car for 3 months before the home charger. We would trickle charge for the whole time it was in the driveway and that was almost enough but we don’t do a lot of kms day to day. If there are fast chargers near your house then it’s probably no big deal to go sit at them for 15-30mins once a week or so to ‘top up’ depending on how many kms you do. We haven’t done any 400+km trips in it yet and I’m very interested to see how it goes when we do. There are some tow bar kits available now (there wasn’t when we purchased), no idea how they go. I don’t think it’d be great for towing much but with young kids you probably need to consider a bike rack at some point. Roof racks are few and far between but Thule make one that fits (I think). All in all we’re very happy with the 7, but we didn’t ever live with the 6 so it’s a bit difficult to accurately compare.

Do you need more than trickle charging? I wouldn't think many people do. Family of 4 with 2 under 5. I love the SL7.

I have a SL 6 and I would love to trade it for an SL7 any day. That being said, I have a home charging and you mentioned that you don't, go for SL6

> How much does it cost and how long to get a full charge at a public charging station? if you aren't able to charge at home, dont bother. And that goes for the SL6 too. defeats the point of a PHEV if you don't charge it.

Go for the SL7! Public charging isn't as bothersome as many people think. And If you even have the possibility to trickle charge, even better.

We can trickle charge it as we have access to a normal PowerPoint l. We are currently renting but hope you buy in 1-2 years, in which case we will install a proper wall charger. We currently live 2 mins drive away/less than 900m from a BP petrol station with chargers, which is why I’m even entertaining the idea of an EV over PHEV

I've had a Sealion 7 for about 3 months now and have only used the trickle charger, it's been more than enough for our normal usage. The rear window is pretty small and visibility isn't the best but it's not a huge issue, you get used to it pretty quickly. The boot space is smaller than I'm used to and is the only thing I don't love about the car. Overall it's a great car, great value for money, I'd choose the 7 over the 6 any day.

What do you mean by no openable sun roof? Cheers

I love my SL6 but the way you've written it, I think the SL7 is the better for you. You don't really have long distance need (where the SL6 PHEV excels) and in reality, most people, most of the time, pack 'back' instead of 'up' (boot height often isn't as valuable as we think). You can survive trickle charging if you can't figure out to install a higher power charger or outlet.

Spot on. We are in a rental with an Model 3 and an Atto 3. We trickle charge both and have no problems. Each of them does about 20-25k kms per year.

Sounds like they can at least trickle charge from a regular outlet, in which case that’s usually ample for EV ownership.

There’s a sunshade that you can open and close but the sun roof doesn’t open like the SL6

Exactly how it sounds. To be clear, they don’t have a sun roof, so it’s not that they don’t have an ‘openable sunroof’ (by definition a sun roof is openable) it’s that they don’t have a sun roof at all. What they have is a glass roof which has a curtain/blind/cover that sides over it (which is much nicer than the Tesla curtain) but they do not have a sun roof that opens. I assumed that the front half the roof would side back to open the roof, like an Audi Q3, but they do not.

The Sealion 6 is a transitional model built on an older platform, so it comes with some compromises. I’d recommend the Sealion 7. It’s built from the ground up on a newer, better platform. It has a longer wheelbase and, just looks better. You can easily add 100km of range overnight just using a standard wall socket. I have two colleagues who have relied on trickle charging for years. Alternatively, check out the PlugShare map. Back when I couldn’t charge at home, I’d just plug in near my grocery store and top up for 20-30 minutes once a week. It was super easy.

I totally agree, I was stressing the reliable, I should have been clearer. They said they maybe moving in a year, who knows whats comes next. To me, en EV only makes sense if you can make home charging work, whatever that looks like.

Have you had a chance to try the Atto 8 ? It might be a better fit for you, especially since it has 3 rows.

I drive 100km a day with my sealion 7 4.5 days a week for work and trickle charging without an installed ev charger works fine so long as i get i up to 80% over the weekend

We are in agreement :) I guess OP would have an idea of the likelihood of being able to charge at the next house. In my town it’s hard to find a house without a garage or carport in which to charge, but if you are in the inner city, that’s much less sure.

Can I please ask which charger you bought? I’m looking to buy one in the new year and there’s so many to choose from. I think since we are single phase I’d only need able to get a 7kw one?

Yes, if you are single phase then 7kW, 32Amp, is your limit unless you use a ‘direct from the house battery’ type charger which can then be larger/faster. This is for Australia, other countries with different voltages/phases as standard will be different. We went with a Myenergi Zappi 7kW 32Amp Charger with a 6.5m fixed cable. Our charger had to be in the front of the house, not in a garage. Our front yard is not secured (no gate on the driveway) and we live on a busy public road. For this reason we wanted a fixed cable rather than a removable cable and the positioning of the charger meant that a 6.5m cable was about as short a cable as we could manage. These physical constraints limited our choices fairly dramatically. The Zappi is fine, it works, but the software is a bit rough and things like scheduling to only charge when the solar is producing seem to only work if you have other myenergi/zappi products as well. However I can’t compare to other home chargers because I’ve never used anything different.

Thanks for this info.

BYD hybrids use too much petrol, I love my SL7 but if owning a single car it wouldn't be an EV. I'd go for the latest Geely hybrid, Starrray

We’ve also got a Toyota Corolla that’s a petrol engine that is our second car

yeah both a bit small... We have a CX8 7 seater plus the SL7 and in many occasions (Bunnings, Costco, airport, etc) we take the Mazda now if you have access to novated leasing the SL7 gets much sweeter