Byton previews electric sedan K-Byte

The new Chinese EV maker Byton has presented its second model at the occasion of CES Asia. The car will be called K-Byte and roll off the production line near Shanghai in 2021. It gets a range of 400 km and should offer Level 4 autonomy.

The crossover, which was revealed at the 2018 CES in Las Vegas and was also showcased at the 2018 Milan Design Week, has been named M-Byte. It should hit the Chinese market in 2019 and cross the Pacific and the Eurasian continent in late 2020.

CATL and Aurora power

The e-power for the crossover and sedan are sourced from CATL, China’s biggest lithium ion battery supplier. The base model gets 71 kilowatt-hours, whereas the more powerful model contains 95-kilowatt-hours of capacity, with the range varying between 400 and 530 km in the case of the M-Byte.

The self-driving software is being developed by Aurora, a company founded by AI and robotics specialists who used to work for Tesla and Alphabet. Byton will start rolling out Level-4 prototypes still this year. K-Byte drivers should be able to take their hands off the steering wheel in 2021, but only in areas that support autonomous driving, Byton said.

Picture copyright: Byton, 2018