Denza Z9GT First Drive 2025

What is the Denza Z9GT?

At this precise point in time, perhaps the more pertinent question is this: What is 'Denza'?

Well, in simple terms, Denza is one of the recent proliferation of Chinese car brands currently dipping a toe into European car-sales markets, and that includes the UK. However, while many of these brands feel rather alien to European tastes and conventions, with weird-and-wonderful names and outlandish-looking products, Denza might be a wee bit more familiar to you than you might think. 

You see, Denza is the luxury arm of BYD, a Chinese brand that kicked off its European adventure a couple of years ago, and has been going great guns ever since, shifting quite a bit of metal in the process. The Atto 3 SUV was the firm’s first effort to hit the UK, followed by the Dolphin supermini, the Seal saloon and the Seal U SUV, each model becoming arguably more compelling and impressive than the last.

And that’s really starting to be reflected in the UK’s sales charts. So far in 2025, BYD has shifted more cars in the UK than long-established brands such as Honda, Citroen, Seat, Fiat, Suzuki and Dacia, plus many, many more brands besides. This indicates that BYD is starting to properly ingratiate itself into the UK market’s mainstream, and is already a serious player. So, if you’re not already familiar with its products, then you likely soon will be.

So, where does Denza fit into all this? Well, like we said, it’s BYD’s luxury brand. Think about what Lexus is to Toyota, or what Genesis is to Hyundai, and you’re pretty much there. The Denza brand was established in 2010 as a joint venture between BYD and Mercedes-Benz - so there’s some proper luxury-car know-how at its heart - but these days, Denza is now fully owned and operated by BYD. The brand expects to launch in the UK in early 2026.

Okay, so that’s Denza: what about the Z9GT? Well, it’s a large, luxurious shooting brake grand tourer, which in China is offered with both a plug-in hybrid powertrain and an all-electric one. That puts it in competition with cars such as the Porsche Panamera and Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo, being very similar in both size (it’s 5.2 metres long) and concept. In fact, take one look at our pictures, you might suspect that Denza could have taken a certain amount of ‘inspiration’ from its German counterpart in the design phase…

Now, it’s fair to say that that’s pretty illustrious competition, and that the Z9GT will need to be pretty special to compete. Well, from what we observed when we got access to the car at Denza’s European brand launch in Milan in April 2025, we’d say it has the necessary chops in the areas of quality, luxury, performance and technology to do just that. In fact, some of the technology on board is cutting-edge enough to feel ever-so-slightly bonkers: we’ll delve deeper into this later, but do stick around, because you’ll definitely want to know about it…

At this point in proceedings, dear reader, we need to make something abundantly and unmistakably clear. While we did get to drive the Denza Z9GT during our little trip to Milan, the car we drove was a Chinese-spec example that will likely bear little resemblance to the final production version that will eventually arrive in the UK. Denza’s engineers told us that almost all key attributes of the car will be changed and fettled to suit European tastes. We were told that European cars will most likely have a significantly different interior layout, plus significantly different figures for power, performance, range, efficiency, and, well, pretty much everything else. There’s also the fact that our drive only lasted a handful of minutes and took place on a closed test track under the strictest conditions.

With such limited experience of a car that’s so non-representative of the one we’ll actually end up getting in the UK, this article is most certainly not a definitive verdict on the Denza Z9GT. Rather, it’s intended to provide a small insight into what you might expect from the car when it arrives, and from the brand as a whole. And so, with that rather fundamental caveat out of the way, let’s get into it…

What’s it like inside?

Like we said, a moment ago, Denza’s engineers told us that the Z9GT’s interior layout was likely to change quite a bit for European cars - one of the likely changes they indicted was the removal of the drive selector on the centre console, substituted by one on the steering column instead - so some questions do remain about the design and layout of the cabin. 

However, one thing that was very noticeable in the car’s interior was the shortage (well, almost a complete absence) of physical buttons and dials for various functions. This is something that we can’t see being changed in UK versions, partly because of the cost involved in introducing them, and partly because of the fact that this kind of minimalism is very much the fashion with car interiors these days. And if we’re right, this will have an effect on ease of use.

This is a car that’s absolutely brimming with technology, gadgetry and functionality, and with so many functions, and hardly any switchgear with which to operate them, it falls on the central touchscreen to be pretty much your sole interface with the car’s raft of abilities. 

On the plus side, the screen is huge, measuring in at a whopping 17.3 inches. It’s also flanked by a pair of additional 13.2-inch screens, one behind the steering wheel to serve as your driver information display, and one in front of the front-seat passenger, allowing them to have their own point of interaction with the car’s numerous multimedia and technology functions. The graphics are sharp and stylish, while the screen transitions are smooth, and the software looks quick and slick. The sensitivity of the central screen is also very good.

However, the sheer complexity of the system means that it can be confusing to use. There are seemingly countless menus and submenus that you need to trawl through in order to perform the simplest of tasks, and these menus are arranged in a hugely complicated and intricate way, so it’s far too easy to get lost. And that’s when the car is stationary. Try and use it while you’re moving, and the concentration required to perform your desired task will be the concentration that you’re not applying to the road ahead.

The Z9GT’s practicality might not be quite what you’re expecting, either, given that it’s such a large car with an estate-like shooting brake silhouette. Of course, there’s loads of space up front, and everything has electric adjustment, so getting comfortable at the wheel is a piece of proverbial, although no amount of adjustment can remedy the appalling rear visibility you get due to the car’s tiny rear window and thick rear pillars.

Rear legroom is also very generous, and so is the width of the cabin, so taking three people across the rear bench is actually pretty comfy, helped further by a wide middle seat with a flat floor in front of it.

However, that comfort will depend on those in the back being on the short side, because headroom is a lot less generous than the other dimensions we’ve mentioned. Anyone six feet tall will find their Barnet brushing the headlining, and if you’re any taller, then life could be pretty uncomfortable. There’s even less headroom if you end up in the middle seat, because the cushion you sit on is slightly higher than those on either side.

The boot is also smaller than you might be expecting, given the size and shape of the car. Denza provided no official figures in that regard, but our experience would lead us to estimate a figure somewhere between 400 and 450 litres. If we’re right, that’s less than you get in a Ford Puma, which is a far smaller car. What’s more, in the cars we drove, there was virtually no underfloor storage, and you couldn’t fold the rear seats down to extend the load area, either. That’s because the rear seats had both an electric reclining function and a fridge hidden behind the central armrest (this also explains the strange protrusion to the boot space). Whether or not these features will be provided on UK cars or not is anyone’s guess, but they do hamper the car’s overall practicality.

However, there’s one very important thing about the Z9GT’s interior that is hugely praiseworthy: even if you’re not the sort to be dazzled by all the tech and luxury kit on board the car, you can’t fail to be dazzled by the quality on show. All the materials look and feel expensive, the assembly appears to be flawless, and the mix of textures, colours and finishes used is as tasteful and as appealing as in any luxury car we can think of. We know there’s plenty that will change with UK-spec cars, but this is one area that we’d really urge Denza not to mess with.

What’s it like to drive?

Like we alluded to earlier, the Z9GT has some fairly mind-bending tech, and this gives it some pretty crazy on-road abilities. However, let’s get the more conventional stuff out of the way first. First up, powertrains.

We didn’t get to drive the all-electric version, and that’s a shame because the numbers are impressive. It has a total of three electric drive motors: each rear wheel gets its own 362PS motor, while the other motor sends 313PS to the front wheels, giving a grand total of 965PS. The figures we were given by Denza indicate a 0-62mph time of 3.4 seconds, which is fast, but a second slower than the similarly powerful Porsche Taycan Turbo manages. 

The plug-in hybrid also has three electric motors, and in the same layout. The rear wheels get 299PS each, while 272PS is sent to the fronts, for a total of 870PS. In addition to that is a 2.0-litre turbocharged petrol engine with 207bhp, mated to an eCVT transmission, but you can’t add that last figure to the total output at the wheels due to how the car’s powertrain uses the petrol engine. 

For the vast majority of the time, it’s only the electric motors driving the wheels, and when the battery level allows, the petrol engine doesn’t fire up at all. When the battery level drops below 20% or so, the petrol engine then fires up to act as an electricity generator to keep the motors going and top up the battery. It’s only at high motorway speeds that a small portion of the petrol engine’s power is used to help drive the wheels, while the rest of it is still being used to charge the battery. Denza’s figures stated a 0-62mph time of 3.6 seconds for the PHEV.

It’s the PHEV that we had the chance to drive, and it's got something of a Jekyll-and-Hyde character. There are two main driving modes: Comfortable and Sport. Leave the car in Comfortable mode, and things are quite docile. Even if you bury the accelerator pedal, there’s a delay of a second or two before anything happens, but once the powertrain gets its act together, you get a strong surge of forward motion, although maybe not as strong as you’d expect given the prodigious power output. Importantly, more gentle use of the right-hand pedal results in proportionately more gentle performance, and it’s all very easy to modulate.

Switch to Sport mode, and the difference is stark. You’re not served up any more power, but it’s delivered in a much more aggressive way. There’s less of a delay when you press the go pedal - although there is still some, which feels a little odd - and after that, the acceleration you feel is considerably stronger, strong enough that that prodigious power output figure feels entirely plausible.

There’s an additional Sport Plus mode on top of that, but we didn’t get a chance to try it during our very short go in the car, and we never got told much about precisely what it does.

The petrol engine - whether simply generating electricity or helping to drive the wheels - stays quiet and smooth at all times, even when it’s having to work hard. In addition to that distant engine note, impressive suppression of wind and road noise also contributes to a very high level of refinement, making for a serene life at any speed.

Now, we know we’ve already said it repeatedly throughout this article, but it can’t hurt to labour the point once again, especially here. All the powertrain numbers we’ve quoted are for the Chinese-spec version of the Z9GT, and will more than likely change for the cars that end up coming to Europe. There are a variety of reasons for this: meeting homologation requirements, compliance with other various regulations, plus the vastly differing unit-testing criteria used in China and Europe. 

The other reason is that numerous aspects of the car will be fine-tuned to suit European tastes. For example, one of Denza’s engineers told us that work is already being done to tone down the European version’s performance a little in order to eke out a little more driving range, because that’s the more important thing to European buyers. And obviously, all these changes will have some sort of effect on the driving experience.

So, powertrain aside, what’s the Z9GT like to roll around in? Well, rather nice, as it happens. There’s four-corner air suspension that adapts its behaviour according to which of the driving modes you select. Stick with the Comfortable mode, and it’s precisely that: at low-to-middling speeds, the suspension does a really impressive job of absorbing lumps and bumps of all shapes and sizes, and doesn't bounce around too much in the process. The steering, meanwhile, has a nice weight and speed to it, and even a bit of genuine feedback, although there is a slight hesitancy to react when you first turn the wheel away from the straight-ahead position.

Things aren’t quite so settled at higher motorway speeds, though: we found that the ride became a little more trembly, and the steering developed a slightly twitchy quality. Neither factor was ruinous to the overall driving experience, though.

Switch the car into Sport mode, and the suspension firms up appreciably, giving a slightly racier, more connected feel. Importantly, though, it doesn’t become uncomfortable. Whatever mode you select, the car displays very strong control over body movements, and there’s a very impressive amount of grip to call upon. That means it changes direction in an admirably capable way, but don’t expect it to feel nimble: a car this big and heavy (the PHEV weighs around 2.8 tonnes and the EV around 2.9 tonnes) is never going to be.

So that’s most of the regular stuff we usually judge a car on out of the way, but it’s fair to say that the Denza Z9GT can do a few things that most cars can’t. Well, ANY cars that we’ve encountered, to be entirely accurate.

While the car’s humongously powerful drivetrain makes it capable of massive speeds, its real party tricks revolve around its low-speed manoeuvring capabilities. These are made possible by a variety of factors, namely the car’s multi-source powertrain arrangement, a hugely clever electronic brain that applies all the correct inputs to the car’s vast collection of actuators, and a hugely advanced rear-wheel steering system. 

Okay, rear-wheel steering is fairly commonplace on luxury cars these days, but while most systems can only turn the rear wheels by a few degrees (either the same was as the fronts to aid high-speed stability, or the opposite way to the fronts to aid low-speed manoeuvrability), the rear wheels of the Z9GT have a much greater range of articulation. Unusually, they also have the ability to point in different directions, and that also helps make the car capable of some very nifty manoeuvring.

Turn the steering wheel all the way to its lock stops, and you’ll immediately be impressed by the tightness of the car’s turning circle, which is better than any car of this size has a right to. However, select the car’s ‘Compass U-Turn’ function, tap a couple of inputs into the touchscreen, and let the car do the rest, and things quickly get even more impressive.

This function essentially locks one of the front wheels (you tell it which one with one of those touchscreen inputs), and this wheel acts as the pivot point around which the car will turn. You then use the overhead view of the car displayed on the touchscreen to input the angle and position that you want the car to end up in. 

At this point, the other front wheel is driven in reverse, while the two rear wheels are pointed in different directions and driven opposite ways, one forwards and one in reverse. All of this gives the car the ability to turn around almost on the spot, pivoting around that locked front wheel. Denza says that the car can turn 360 degrees in just 9.24 metres, which, when the car is 5.2 metres long, is pretty much twice the distance of the space between the locked front wheel and the rear of the car. It’s really clever stuff.

There’s another very nifty function that’s made possible by this technique, too, which could well be a godsend for people who aren’t confident - or who are just plain rubbish - at parallel parking. You find yourself a space of the appropriate size, and drive into it nose-in, with the kerbside front wheel positioned where it would end up when the car is parked, but with the back end of the car still sticking out into the road. Once you’re there, you select the ‘e3 parking’ function, and using the same interface as before, you choose to lock that kerbside front wheel, and you tell the car to adjust its angle to match the angle of the kerb. Then, using all the same wheel-articulation jiggery-pokery, the car dutifully drags its own back end into the space, and it can also move out of the space in the same way.

The same tech also allows the Z9GT to ‘crab walk’, as Denza calls it. When you select the appropriate mode, the car turns its rear wheels in the same direction as the fronts, and at the same angle, which effectively gives you the ability to drive sideways at the same speed as moving forwards at low speeds. Imagine doing a power drift while going at walking pace, and it feels a bit like that. Admittedly, this function is far less useful than the other two, but it’s no less theatrical. 

And speaking of theatre, we’ve done our best to explain these novel abilities, but you won’t experience the true theatricality of them until you see them for yourself. YouTube has a whole bunch of videos of the Z9GT doing its thing, so we’d recommend giving it a look, but do make sure you finish reading this article first…

And with all of these stunts, there’s another thing worth bearing in mind. When performing them, the car’s rear wheels can’t rotate at the natural rate that they normally would. That’s due to the torque application needed to achieve the desired effect, combined with the fact that the unnatural direction that the rear wheels are pointing in means that they’re effectively working against one another. The result is that as the rear wheels rotate during these manoeuvres, their tyres scrub slowly across the road surface, making a rather unpleasant noise, a slightly unpleasant smell, and inevitably increasing the wear on your rear boots.

That’s all very well, but how much is it?

To be honest, your guess is as good as ours at this point. Like we’ve said, there are countless decisions still to be made on final UK specifications for the Z9GT, and where most new cars are concerned, the price that the maker will actually charge for it is one of the final decisions on the list. That means that the UK price is some way off even being discussed internally by Denza, let alone being released to the motoring press.

We’re prepared to make a few educated guesses on a few things, though. Firstly, with the car being pitched at such salubrious competition, we can’t imagine that it’ll be cheap, especially given the power, technology and quality, not to mention the hefty amount of kit that it’s likely to come with. Again, the specifics of that equipment spec remain a mystery, but BYD already operates with an ‘everything as standard’ ethos, and we can’t see that changing for Denza, especially when it’s the company’s premium offshoot.

We’d also predict that, while the Z9GT won’t be cheap, it’ll probably be cheaper than the competition we’ve identified. Even with all the groundbreaking tech, this car will need to undercut its rivals to have any significant impact against desirable and established models from desirable and established brands. Of course, those rivals themselves are enormously expensive, so there’s plenty of headroom to work with when it comes to pricing, so it’s just a case of where Denza decides to pitch itself in comparison. We await the final pricing announcement with interest, although we’ll be waiting a long old time yet.

For the reasons we’ve identified, running costs are just as much of a mystery. We were supplied with data for the Chinese-spec cars we drove, which suggested that the electric version has a range of 391 miles on a full charge of its 100kW battery, while the plug-in hybrid will do 125 electric-only miles on a full charge of its 38.5kWh battery, and then return fuel economy of 37.2mpg once that battery charge is gone. However, you must remember that these figures are measured according to the Chinese-standard CLTC testing regime, which is vastly different to the WLTP standard used in Europe, so the resulting figures will likely be wildly different.

And that’s before you factor in the numerous and significant engineering changes that will be made for the European market. As we’ve said, Denza’s engineers suggested that they’ll look to trade off some power and performance in favour of a little more range, as per the European preference. However, the differences in testing standards will still corrupt the comparative accuracy of the figures given. One Denza engineer hinted to us that the ballpark range figure that they were looking to hit under WLTP tests would be somewhere between 310 and 340 miles.

As for other running costs, you can expect massively high insurance bills, what with prices and power levels likely to be so very astronomical. Tyres won’t be cheap to replace, either, and despite Denza’s claims that those crabbing and turning-on-a-sixpence functions don’t lunch your tyres as much as you might think (although the firm wouldn’t officially quantify it, tellingly), we’re rather sceptical given what we observed - and smelled - during our demonstration. We also wonder about the strain these party tricks put on other parts, such as the brakes and drivetrain.

Summary

Notice how we've called this bit a summary, rather than a verdict? That’s because, as we explained before, we can’t really judge the Z9GT fairly when we’ve driven such a non-representative car, and only for a very short period. However, we’ve experienced enough to feel excited by the car’s eventual arrival.

You’ll decide for yourself whether those party-piece manoeuvring abilities are genuine life-savers or mere snake oil, but in many other respects, the car has impressed us with its more conventional merits. It’s enjoyable, comfortable and refined to drive, not to mention devilishly quick, while the interior has the class, quality, luxury and technology to cut it against its high-falutin rivals.

Sure, there are some creases that need to be ironed out - the curiously slow throttle response, the overly complex touchscreen, the needlessly over-elaborate rear-seat packaging that damages practicality - and Denza also needs to get the price of the car right. However, with the thick end of a year to go before the car is likely to arrive on these shores, and with much work still to do on the car before it does, we have high hopes.