The Denza Z9GT is a large five-door shooting brake grand tourer from Chinese company BYD’s forthcoming luxury brand. It isn’t on sale in Europe or the UK yet, but it’ll probably be one of Denza’s first offerings when the brand is launched in the UK at the end of 2025 or beginning of 2026.
Pros:
- Looks good inside and out
- Huge performance
- Decent ride comfort at most speeds
Cons:
- Complicated touchscreen
- Practicality could be better
- Lots of unknowns at this early stage
2026 Denza Z9GT review
- What is the Denza Z9GT?
- How practical is it?
- What’s it like to drive?
- Technology, equipment and infotainment
- Three things to know
- Which one to buy
- Denza Z9GT running costs
- Denza Z9GT reliability
- Denza Z9GT Verdict
What is the Denza Z9GT?
Before we get onto the Z9GT, we should probably give you the lowdown on Denza. So, you know BYD, that giant Chinese new-energy vehicle maker that recently came to the UK and has been making extremely rapid progress ever since with its very convincing models and clever battery technology? Well, Denza is a part of the same group, and represents BYD’s luxury brand. The Denza brand started life in 2010 as part of an automotive joint venture with Mercedes-Benz, but nowadays, it’s 100% BYD’s baby. Think of what Lexus is to Toyota or what Genesis is to Hyundai, and you’re just about there. In China, BYD has yet another luxury sub-brand, known as Yangwang, which sits above even Denza.
The Z9GT will be one of three models (we don’t know for sure, but we guess that the other two will be the D9 MPV and N7 SUV) that’ll spearhead the brand’s offering when it properly lands in the UK at the end of 2025 or beginning of 2026. It might not be the first - Denza hasn’t actually decided the order yet - but BYD’s Executive Vice President Stella Li has been quoted as saying that the Z9GT has “European influence at its heart”, and that it’s “the perfect choice to lead Denza into Europe”. And whether it is or it isn’t, it will definitely be Denza’s flagship.
It’s an E-segment (that means it’s big, at about 5.2 metres long) luxury shooting brake grand tourer, and it’s offered in both all-electric form, or with a plug-in hybrid powertrain, both with massive performance. As such, it’ll rival salubrious models from very desirable car brands such as the Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo, Porsche Panamera, Audi A7 Sportback, Audi E-Tron GT, the Tesla Model S, various large electric luxury car offerings from BMW, and a diverse blend of many others. In fact, look at our pictures, and you might notice more than a passing resemblance to the first of those competitors we namechecked...
In order to dust it with such established competition, it uses some pretty unique and groundbreaking technology (we’ll get into that more a little later, but trust us, it’s worth the wait), and aims to marry that with very strong performance, a plush interior and plenty of luxury gadgetry for an effortlessly high-end feel. So, does it manage that impressive-sounding feat?
Well, we caught up with the car at Denza’s European brand launch at Brera Design Week in Milan at the beginning of April 2025, and had a very (and we mean very) brief go in a Chinese-spec model in tightly controlled conditions on a closed test track. Indeed, UK/European specifications for the car haven’t even been confirmed yet, and that includes for things as pivotal as power outputs and driving range. As a result, we freely admit that this review won’t be a chapter-and-verse final word on every small detail of the car. However, we hope our experience with the car can give you a flavour of what to expect when it finally lands on these shores, and we’ll update this page once we’ve had a more extensive go in a more representative UK-spec car.
How practical is it?
The BYD Denza Z9GT a bit of a mixed bag in this area, especially given the enormous size of the car. Even with a pair of tall adults ensconced in the front seats, there’s masses of legroom behind for rear-seat passengers, enough to stretch out in luxury. The case for carrying three across the rear bench is enhanced by very decent shoulder room and a wide middle seat with an entirely flat floor.
Rear headroom, however, is a lot less generous than the legroom. Six-foot adults will just about fit, but anyone taller will find their head pressing against the headlining, and anyone taller still might well be rather uncomfortable. Things are worse for whoever finds themselves in the middle seat, because the cushion you sit on is slightly raised, meaning even less headroom.
Open up the hatchback bootlid, and the space you get isn’t terrible, but it’s isn’t brilliant, either, especially given the size of the car. We’ve not seen any official capacity figures, but we’d estimate it being somewhere between 400 and 450 litres, which is the kind of space you’d expect from a much smaller car. There’s virtually no underfloor storage, either.
In the cars we sampled, you couldn’t drop the rear seats to boost carrying capacity, either. Instead, the rear-seat backrests had a powered reclining function, along with a fridge stashed behind the fold-down backrest (which also accounts for the strange hump protruding into the boot space in our pictures). We’re unsure whether or not these features will be included on UK cars, though, so it might well be that folding rear seats will be available when those cars land.
Of course, the front seats in the cars we drove also had electric adjustment, so finding a comfortable driving position is easy, No matter what you do with it, though, you’ll have fairly dreadful rearward visibility due to the teeny rear window with thick pillars either side.
You’ll have no complaints about the interior quality, though. Every single surface you encounter looks and feels plush and expensive, and the mixture of textures and colours on show is tasteful and attractive. We’d say that this is a match for most other cars in the premium sector on perceived quality.
What’s it like to drive?
The Z9GT is available in two forms, as an all-electric car and as a plug-in hybrid. We haven’t driven the former, but the numbers quoted are certainly impressive. There are a total of three electric drive motors, two on the rear axle, each sending a maximum of 322bhp to one of the rear wheels, and one on the front axle sending 308bhp to the front wheels. Tot that up, and it’s a total of 952bhp. Which is quite a bit. No surprise, then, that the 0-62mph dash can be dispensed with in just 3.4 seconds.
The PHEV - which we have had a go in - also has three electric motors in the same layout. In this case, the two rear motors punt out 295bhp each, while the one up front produces 268bhp. That’s a total of ‘just’ 858bhp. The petrol motor, meanwhile, is a 204bhp 2.0-litre turbocharged unit, mated to an eCVT gearbox. However, you can’t add that last figure to the total power output figure due to the way the petrol engine is used. Allow us to explain.
When the battery level allows, the car drives in 100% electric mode. When the battery drops too low (around 20% or so, we’re told), the petrol engine kicks in to act as a generator to recharge the battery and keep the electric motors going. At higher motorway speeds, the petrol engine does chip in to help drive the wheels as well, but the majority of its power is still being used to charge the battery, and so doesn’t get anywhere near the wheels. The PHEV is still fast against the stopwatch, though, seeing off the 0-62mph sprint in 3.6 seconds. But what does it feel like to drive?
Leave the car in its more docile driving mode (there are two main ones, Comfortable and Sport), and there’s a delay of a second or two after you floor the throttle before anything happens, but once the car jumps up and stands to attention, then it unfurls very strong acceleration indeed, although maybe not as strong as you might be expecting given the prodigious numbers.
Switch the car to the racier Sport mode, and you’ll notice a big difference. The power dished out is the same, but with a far more aggressive map. The result is slightly less of a delay when you nail the pedal (although there is still some), and far more rapid acceleration thereafter. The car also has a Sport Plus mode on top of this, but we didn’t get a chance to try it on our short drive, and we weren’t really told too much about what it does anyway.
When the petrol engine kicks in, whether in generator or wheel-driving mode, it stays distantly quiet and smooth, even when it’s revving pretty hard. In fact, refinement is generally really good, with very little murmur from the powertrain, excellent suppression of wind noise (the double-glazed side windows on our car doubtless helped there) and good suppression of road noise, too.
With all of the above powertrain stuff, however, it’s important to remember that all the numbers we’ve quoted here are for the Chinese-spec versions of the Z9GT. These could - and probably will - change quite a bit for European-spec cars. A Denza representative told us that this is not only due to homologation requirements and compliance with other regulations, but also that work was being done by Denza’s engineers to trade a little performance in exchange for more battery range, to better suit European tastes. It’s likely, then, that the driving experience will change accordingly.
The Z9GT has all-round air suspension that alters its softness according to which of the two driving modes you select. Select Comfortable, and the ride is impressively plush and smooth at low-to-middling speeds, mopping over lumps and bumps of all shapes and sizes, while not bouncing too much over speed bumps. You’ll also find that the nose of the car doesn’t lift too much when you accelerate hard, and doesn’t dive too much when you brake with similar abruptness.
The steering is quite nice when pootling around, too. There’s an initial hesitancy to react when you first turn the wheel, but once it does, it has nice weight and speed, while there’s even a bit of feedback to be felt.
Go faster, and we’re talking the motorway limit here, and the ride isn’t quite as settled as when you’re going slower. You feel a distinct tremble from underneath you, while the steering develops a slightly twitchy quality.
Selecting Sport mode firms things up a fair bit in all situations. It gives the car a racier feel at low speeds, but without totally scuppering the ride comfort. In corners, the car changes direction in an admirably controlled way in all modes, with mammoth grip levels and good body control. That’s the case even in Comfort mode, and to be fair, you don’t notice a great deal of difference in Sport mode. Don’t go expecting sports-car agility whatever mode you select. A car this heavy (around 2.8 tonnes for the PHEV and 2.9 tonnes for the EV) is never going to feel nimble no matter how clever the engineering.
Denza Z9GT compass u-turn
That engineering is hugely clever, mind, clever enough to achieve the car’s real party trick, which concerns its low-speed manoeuvring. This is made achievable by the car’s multi-source powertrain arrangement, a super-clever electronic brain that applies the necessary inputs to all the car’s myriad actuators, and a super-advanced rear-wheel steering system. While rear-wheel steering is nothing new, most such systems can only articulate their rear wheels by a few degrees to either emulate the behaviour of the fronts (to aid high speed stability and agility), or do the opposite to the fronts (to aid low-speed manoeuvrability). However, the Z9GT’s rear wheels have a much greater range of articulation than usual for a greater effect on both fronts, and they also have the ability - unusually - to point in opposite directions, which helps even further with low-speed manoeuvrability.
And sure enough, swing the steering wheel to the extremes of its lock, and the tightness of its turning circle is deeply impressive for such a large car. However, it gets a lot more impressive once you enable the ‘Compass U-Turn’ function, dial in a couple of inputs into the touchscreen, and let the car take care of the rest.
Here’s how it works. Once you’ve enabled the function, you select which of the two front wheels you want to lock, which acts as the pivot point around which the car will turn. You then input the angle and position you want the car to end up in on an overhead view of the car on the touchscreen display. While the selected front wheel is locked, the other front wheel is driven in reverse, while the two rear wheels are pointed in different directions and driven in different directions, one forwards and one backwards. Using this method, it’s possible for the car to rotate almost on the spot, pivoting around that locked front wheel, turning 360 degrees in a space of just 9.24 metres. That’s some way less than two car lengths of the Z9GT, and the kind of turning circle you’d expect of your average A-segment city car, rather than a car that’s more than five metres long.
Denza Z9GT e3 parking
And that’s not it. Using that same technique, the Z9GT also offers a world-first self-parking function. Find yourself a parallel parking space, and drive the car into it nose-in, with the front of the car positioned where it would end up at the end of a regular parallel parking manoeuvre, but with your back end still sticking out into the road. You then select the ‘e3 parking’ function, choose to lock the front wheel nearest the kerb, and using the overhead view display, tell the system to bring the car in line with the kerb (this all takes approximately 15-20 seconds). The car then effectively drags its own back end across into the parking space. You can also move out of the space in the same way. Granted, all this takes longer than it would usually take for you to just park the car yourself, but it will be a boon for those who aren’t confident with parallel parking, or when someone has parked too close to you and effectively blocked you in.
Denza Z9GT crab walk
The system has another party trick, that’s a lot less useful, but no less novel. When you select the appropriate mode, the car has the ability to steer the rear wheels in the same direction and at the same angle as the fronts, allowing the car to ‘crab walk’, or in other words, drive slowly sideways like you’re doing some sort of bonkers low-speed power drift.
With all of these things, we’ve done our best to explain them, but you won’t fully understand the theatre of it all until you see it for yourself. There are lots of videos of the Z9GT pulling its tricks on YouTube, so we suggest you go ahead and search it up.
There’s something worth bearing in mind with all these novel stunts, though, and that’s that when performing them, the rear wheels can’t rotate at their normal, natural rate because of the torque application needed to achieve the desired effect, plus the fact that the rear wheels are effectively working against each other. So, as the rear wheels rotate, their tyres scrub - albeit slowly - across the road surface. That means that performing these actions often doesn’t sound - or smell - very nice, and tyre wear will inevitably increase, but the effect is nevertheless very impressive.
Technology, equipment and infotainment
With this area like pretty much all the others, there’s a great deal we don’t know about the spec of UK cars. Well, pretty much everything, in fact. The cars we encountered were properly tooled-up, with every gadget and trinket you could possibly think of, or dream up yourself. Fridges, massaging seats, a gazillion-speaker Devialet sound system, the lot. We reckon the cars we drove would probably shine your shoes for you if you asked nicely enough. However, UK specs are several months away from being finalised, so we have no idea of whether or not all of this stuff will be available, let alone standard, or what the trim structure - if indeed there is one - is likely to look like.
What we guess will be standard across the board, though, is the infotainment system we encountered. This includes a 13.2-inch screen behind the steering wheel to serve up all your necessary driving information, a massive 17.3-inch touchscreen in the middle of the dashboard to operate most - well, pretty much all - of the car’s other functions, and there’s another 13.2-inch screen on the passenger side of the dash so that they can interact with various media and infotainment functions.
First, the positives. The screens are glossy-looking and crystal clear, with pin-sharp graphics, attractive fonts and crisp screen transitions. The screen sensitivity is pretty good as well, so you’re rarely left jabbing repeatedly at an on-screen icon to get the system to register your command.
However, like many such systems, its complexity is an issue for user-friendliness. Like we alluded to earlier, pretty much every function has to be operated through the touchscreen because there’s pretty much no other switchgear to be found on the dashboard (it’s not up to Volvo-like levels of ludicrousness where you even use the touchscreen to open the glovebox lid and adjust your door mirrors, but it’s not far off). And because the car is so stuffed with gadgetry, there are a lot of functions to cover. This means that the system is packed with a long and convoluted ecosystem of menus and submenus, which you must scroll through - and tab between - to find the function you want, and it’s all so complex that finding your desired function is a complicated and time-consuming business.
Three things to know
- Denza has a series of ‘brand values’ that it has applied to the letters of its name. These are ‘Diverse’, ‘Elegance’, ‘Novel’, ‘Zenith’ and ‘Aspirational’. We get what they’re suggesting with a few of those, but a couple of the others have left us scratching our heads figuring out precisely what they’re supposed to mean. We don’t know exactly where the Denza name comes from, but we know that it isn’t an acronym/initialisation of these words.
- As well as all the usual ADAS (Advanced Driving Assistance Systems) features you’ll be used to, the Z9GT has another that you might not have encountered before. This is a system designed to keep the car under control during a high-speed tyre blowout (probably a good thing to have when your tyres are getting graunched across the Tarmac on a regular basis). The drive system cuts the torque to the stricken wheel and redirects it to the other three, while the air suspension adjusts to level off the body, accounting for the corner that is no longer supported.
- The Denza Z9GT is built on a vehicle architecture called the e3 platform (pronounced e-cube), which is a Denza-specific piece of kit that’s not used by any BYD product. It does, however, use BYD’s cutting-edge ‘Blade’ battery technology, which is a lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) arrangement that also happens to be cobalt-free, saving resources of rare earth metals. The Cell-to-Body construction of the car means that the battery pack is part of the car’s structure, and actually forms the floor of the car, which increases torsional rigidity by 32% and reduces side impact crash intrusion by 35%.
Which one to buy
- If you like a gimmick: If you want your car to drive sideways down the street, turn on a sixpence, and shake its moneymaker while parallel parking, all while putting its tyres through the ringer, then the Z9GT is definitely the car for you. We’re being glib, of course: there’s much more to it than that.
- If you want a more established electric car that looks very similar: The Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo is sensational to drive, lovely to sit in, devastatingly fast, and has a desirable and recognisable Porsche badge. And you won’t have to explain to people what it is every five minutes.
- If you’d prefer a plug-in hybrid: The Porsche Panamera does a very similar job to both the Taycan and the Z9GT, but comes with a variety of different PHEV powertrains, all of which are massively powerful.
Denza Z9GT running costs
Guess what? Yup, that’s right, there’s a great deal of information that’s absolutely crucial in this area that we simply don’t know yet. Like the price for one thing. With the type of car that the Z9GT is, and the type of competition it’ll be pitching itself at, we can’t imagine that it’ll be a cheap car by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, we think it’ll need to undercut the Porsche Taycans/Panameras of the world to make any kind of significant splash with British buyers, but with those cars being so expensive, there’s plenty of room below to work with, and we simply don’t know where Denza will draw the line. Time will tell on that score.
And what about range and fuel economy and the like? Well, there are lots of unknowns on that score, too. According to data supplied to us for the Chinese-spec cars we drove, the EV (electric vehicle) version has a range of 391 miles from its 100kWh battery (it supports DC rapid-charging of 82kW, by the way), while the PHEV has an electric-only range of 125 miles from a 38.5kWh battery, and a fuel economy of 37.2mpg once the battery is depleted.
However, all those figures are measured by Chinese CLTC testing standards, which are vastly different to the WLTP ones we use in the UK, so even before you factor in any engineering and software changes applied by Denza’s boffins between now and the time the car goes on sale, the figures will still most likely - well, almost certainly - be different. And as we explained earlier, we do know that Denza’s engineers will probably look to sacrifice a little power in exchange for a little more range and efficiency with European-spec cars. It was suggested to us by one Denza engineer that when adjusted for the WLTP test cycle, they’d be targeting a range of around 310- to 340 miles.
We can make some fairly reliable hypotheses about a few things, mind. With so much power on hand, and a list price that’s likely to be very high, you can bet that insurance costs will be fairly astronomical. The car’s high performance levels also mean that consumables such as tyres will be under high stress, and those tyres are unlikely to be cheap. And that’s before you consider the extra wearing effect of those super-tight turning and crabbing functions as they drag your tyre treads across the Tarmac. Denza’s officials claimed that these functions don’t increase the tyre wear as much as you might think, but wouldn’t officially quantify it. We also wonder what level of stress these functions put on the brakes, motors and other parts.
Denza Z9GT reliability
Tricky one, this. It’s notoriously difficult to judge how reliable a brand new model will be, and for clues, we usually look to the previous performance of its maker in that regard. However, that’s not really possible here because this brand new car is also from a brand new, er, brand, one that hasn’t even arrived in the UK yet.
Sure, we could look at the performance of parent company BYD in the various reliability and customer satisfaction surveys doing the rounds, but even that brand hasn’t been plying its trade in the UK for long enough to feature in most of them. As a result, clues to the Denza Z9GT’s mechanical dependability are rather thin on the ground.
Denza Z9GT Verdict
It would be unfair of us to give a definitive verdict on the Denza Z9GT, given how little time we spent with it, and given that the car we sampled was a Chinese-spec model that’ll likely be very different to the final European version. It would be even more unfair still of us to give it a star rating, which is precisely why we haven’t. We’ll wait until we’ve driven a more representative example before we do that.
Based on what we’ve experienced, though, there are some reasons to be optimistic about the car. There’s huge performance on offer, combined with potentially low running costs, along with impressive refinement and a comfortable ride at most speeds. Cabin quality is fabulous, meanwhile, and kit levels are likely to be very generous. Sure, practicality could be better, and while some of the tech is interesting, we question how much you’d actually use it, and what effect it might have on the life of your tyres. And obviously, a lot will come down to the eventual cost of the car relative to rivals. Still, it looks like an impressive and interesting start from this new Chinese brand.
Bodystyles:
- Five-door shooting brake
