Kia Tasman vs BYD Shark 6: Which new ute won the launch battle?

Two huge pieces of ute news broke within an hour on Tuesday night, when BYD announced local Shark 6 pricing and Kia finally revealed the Tasman, but there was a clear winner on our website.

In the 24 hours after we published our Shark 6 pricing and Tasman reveal coverage, our data shows that for every 100 page views of the BYD there were 86 for the Tasman.

Throw in BYD’s own website crashing as buyers rushed to place orders, and the Chinese brand has much to crow about.

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Kia Tasman vs BYD Shark 6: Which new ute won the launch battle?

It said it had received 800 orders within minutes of these opening at 7:30pm AEDT, which knocked its site offline.

Orders reopened after 11:00pm, and BYD said it still ended up recording 1400 orders for the plug-in hybrid ute within the first 12 hours, culminating in a total of 2000 orders in the first 24 hours.

Kia did win when it came to comments and engagements on our site, however. Our Tasman reveal article had interactions from 85 per cent more commenters and received more than twice the number of total comments as recorded on our Shark 6 content.

Our readers appeared to have stronger opinions on the Tasman. Looking at upvotes and downvotes on comments, the Tasman recorded 100 engagements for every 69 registered on the Shark 6. Perhaps that was due to the Tasman’s deliberately polarising design, though it’s also worth noting the Shark 6 had been revealed months ago.

Rival brands appeared to try and steal some attention on the day of the announcements, as has happened before on other days with major ute announcements.

Toyota dropped a press release earlier in the day to announce it was supplying mining giant BHP with an electric HiLux for testing, while Ford announced where the public will be able to see the Ranger PHEV in person for the first time in Australia.

With 365 other days in 2024 to choose from, it’s interesting that Kia and BYD’s ute events fell on the same date.

Was this coincidence, did one (or both) companies hope to cannibalise the ‘air time’ of the other, or were all parties trying to benefit from the collective hype generated within a single day?

Kia has been teasing the Tasman to the Australian public since March 2024, including a sports star-studded television commercial, though initial details came to light much earlier in June 2023.

The ute won’t officially launch in Australia until July 2025, however.

The BYD Shark 6, in contrast, was revealed back in May 2024, and Australian journalists have already been given the chance to drive one, earlier this month.

It was first spied in China in November 2022 and revealed in patent images back in October 2023.

So, the Tasman and Shark 6 have been making headlines for some time now, but year-to-date it’s the BYD that has been getting more attention from our readers.

Compared to the Tasman, CarExpert has published 27 per cent fewer articles on the Shark 6 so far this year, yet we received double the page views and more than double the average page views per article.

It’s not just on our site where the BYD has had the lead. Looking at Google search traffic over the past week, for every 100 searches of the Shark 6 in Australia there were 72 for the Tasman.

However, Kia’s first ute eked out a narrow victory when looking at CarExpert content on YouTube.

Our Tasman content on YouTube attracted almost double the number of views as our Shark 6 content, but there’s a significant caveat here – we published five Tasman videos on YouTube and three of the Shark 6.

Looking at the average YouTube views per video, for every 100 views of Tasman content there were still 93 views for the Shark 6 videos, representing a much tighter margin.

We’ve got plenty more content coming for both the Tasman and Shark 6, so stay tuned.