BYD‘s premium brand Denza launched its first electric supercar at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Thursday, pricing the Denza Z from £142,900 ($191,400) in the UK and taking a Chinese performance car directly into the home market of Porsche and Ferrari.
The car arrives in three versions, the hardtop Coupe at £142,900, the soft-top Spider convertible at £159,900 ($214,100) and the track-focused Racing at £172,900 ($231,500), a 21.0% premium over the entry trim.
Denza will open UK pre-orders in October, with the earliest deliveries expected by the end of the year.
The brand chose the British hill climb, running from Thursday to Sunday, for the global debut of the Coupe and Racing variants, after showing the Spider at the Beijing Auto Show in April.
“Born to perform, built to win,” the company wrote on LinkedIn on Thursday, announcing the Coupe’s arrival on the Goodwood stage.
The Powertrain
The Denza Z uses a tri-motor arrangement, with a single 500-kilowatt motor on the front axle and two 340-kilowatt motors at the rear, for a combined peak output of 1,180 kilowatts.
Denza quotes that figure as 1,604 metric horsepower, equivalent to 1,582 imperial horsepower, a number that places the car above most of the internal-combustion machinery it will share the Goodwood hill with.
Performance separates the three variants more sharply than the shared output suggests.
The Racing accelerates from zero to 100 kilometres per hour in 1.96 seconds and reaches 350 kilometres per hour, while the Coupe takes 2.25 seconds and the Spider 2.30 seconds, both limited to 300 kilometres per hour.
The distinction matters because Denza’s pre-launch briefings had described the car generally as accelerating to 100 kilometres per hour in under two seconds, a claim that in production applies only to the Racing.
The company attributes the Racing’s advantage to a carbon-fibre aerodynamic package rather than to additional power.
Charging and Chassis
Denza says the Z charges from 10% to 97% in nine minutes using BYD‘s Flash Charging system, framing the capability as a supercar that should not keep its driver waiting.
The car runs an 800-volt architecture with BYD‘s second-generation Blade battery, using lithium iron phosphate chemistry, though Denza has not disclosed the pack’s capacity.
Underneath sits the e3 platform, which BYD describes as enabling independent drive from all three motors and independent steering of the two rear wheels, producing a turning circle of 4.62 metres.
The Z also carries the DiSus-M magnetorheological body control system, which builds damping force in under 10 milliseconds and is shared with the Yangwang U9, alongside a steer-by-wire system BYD says is the first developed entirely in-house in China, and a folding steering wheel.
A carbon-fibre roof is standard, with a carbon bonnet and an electrically adjustable rear spoiler offered as options.
Wolfgang Egger’s Design
The model was styled under Wolfgang Egger, BYD‘s global design director, who previously led design at Audi, Lamborghini and Alfa Romeo.
Denza Z first appeared as a concept at the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2025, and the production Spider followed at Beijing a year later, retaining the concept’s sweptback headlights, pronounced rear haunches, air inlets ahead of the rear wheels and diamond-shaped tail lights.
The convertible measures 4,780 millimetres long, 1,990 wide and 1,350 tall on a 2,780-millimetre wheelbase, weighing 2,290 kilograms, while the hardtop sits 20 millimetres lower and 70 kilograms lighter.
The Racing stretches to 4,870 millimetres with a more aggressive front splitter and a large rear wing.
Denza has been testing the car at the Nürburgring Nordschleife since October 2025, and its sales chief, Li Hui, said in December that lap-record results would be announced afterwards.
The English actor Daniel Craig has been enlisted for the car’s marketing since late March.
Europe First, With a Caveat
Denza has presented the Z as launching in Europe ahead of China, a reversal of the usual sequence for a Chinese brand, and Goodwood is the proof.
The order books tell a more complicated story.
Chinese pre-orders open on July 13, three months before the UK’s, with sales in both markets starting in the fourth quarter, so Europe leads on the unveiling rather than on the transaction.
The Z anchors a wider push, with BYD using Goodwood to launch the Denza brand in the UK alongside the Z9GT grand tourer, the BAO5 and the D9 people carrier, on what the organisers describe as the largest stand the festival has hosted.
Denza opened its first standalone German store in Hamburg in early June, with Cologne and Frankfurt to follow and roughly 40 sales outlets planned across the country by the end of the year.
A Halo for a Brand Under Pressure
The Z arrives as Denza struggles at home.
The brand’s sales peaked at 18,139 units in December, then fell in January and February, recovering only to 7,133 in March and 10,638 in April, with monthly declines against the prior year running as steep as 50%.
May brought 15,620 deliveries, up 7.3% from a year earlier, the first month in 2026 that Denza stopped shrinking.
