Hyundai Nexo vs BYD Atto 1

What's the difference?

The first time I drove the Hyundai Nexo it was in a place called Goyang in South Korea.

Goyang was a place of pure contrast. The old Korea clashed with the new as you walked through ancient seafood markets toward the towering Hyundai Motorstudio, an ultra-modernist expression of design, perched like a steel battleship above a simultaneously crumbling and rapidly modernising city. 

Part museum, part design expo, part car dealership of the future, it was as though the whole place was a metaphor for the breakneck pace at which megacorp Chaebols like Hyundai were advancing Korea at a faster rate than its populace could keep up with.

The brand’s Nexo SUV is the same in a lot of ways. It’s a mid-size SUV that might be popular right now, but it contains the technology of the future wrapped in a digestible format for the masses.

Of course, it’s the future from a certain point of view. VW would argue EVs alone are set to drive our brave zero emissions future, but Hyundai is of a different mind.

What you’re looking at here, or so Hyundai’s representatives tell us, is the ultimate replacement for diesel. Long range, high load capacity, and an ultra-fast refuelling time are part of the hydrogen fuel cell promise. One that promises to out-do many of Australia’s qualms with EVs.

A statement of the future it may be, but what’s the Hyundai Nexo actually like as a car? We went to its Australian launch to find out

Back in 2010, Mitsubishi released Australia’s first mainstream electric vehicle (EV) in nearly a century.

That model, the i-MiEV, was a four-seater city-sized Kei car from Japan that cost $48,800, before on-road costs, or from roughly $70,000 in today's money. Little wonder it bombed. That was four times more than petrol-powered equivalents of the time.

Now, in 2026, the new BYD Atto 1 is the first EV sold here since the i-MiEV’s 2013 departure to be considered a four-seater city car.

It’s also the least-expensive EV money can buy, being even cheaper than many internal-combustion engine alternatives like the Mazda 2 and Toyota Yaris hybrid. The fact is, there’s nothing remotely near the Chinese supermini’s base price that’s electric.

But is the Atto 1 any good?