BYD Shark dethrones Raptor – 2025 Motoring Newsmaker No 7

The BYD Shark arrived in 2025 with great fanfare as the most powerful bakkie in South Africa. But it could it money money where its mouth was against the Ford Ranger Raptor?

The Ford Ranger Raptor dethroned the previous generation 190kW VW Amarok as South Africa’s fastest bakkie by some some margin back in 2023. Its twin-turbo 3.0-litre V6 petrol engine producing 292kW of power and 583Nk of torque made the Raptor the most powerful local bakkie at the time. It clocked a time of 6.90 seconds from 0 to 100km/h to shatter the Amarok’s sprint time of 8.14 set in 2021.

BYS Shark takes down Raptor

The BYD Shark is South Africa’s first plug-in hybrid bakkie. A 1.5-litre turbo petrol engine, two electric motors and a battery delivers a combined output of 321kW/650Nm.

In one of The Citizen Motoring‘s most highly-anticipated performance tests of the year, we couldn’t wait to put BYD claim that the Shark can sprint from 0 to 100km/h in 5.70 seconds to the test. An incredible test result of 5.66 seconds not only made it the fastest production bakkie in Mzansi, but also made sure that no hot hatch is ever safe with this predator close.

Even better was our fuel consumption of 9.8 litres per 100km/h in the BYD Shark. This makes it much easier on the juice than the Raptor.