Skywell BE11 Review (2025)

Introduction

Yes, we hear you. ‘What on earth’s a Skywell BE11?’. If the name is intriguing, the backstory is, too.

Skywell Auto is the latest Chinese automotive manufacturer to tempt the UK public - and its first car, an electric SUV, has just arrived on our shores.

Many long-established Chinese car makers have never offered a car here before - and neither has Skywell. But the key difference? Skywell isn’t long-established.

While the fully-electric BE11 is Skywell's first car in the UK, it's only Skywell's second car, despite its roots tracing back more than 35 years.

So, what’s taken so long?

Skyworth Auto is a joint venture, started in 2017 between two Chinese companies founded in 1988: bus manufacturer Skywell Group and household appliance manufacturer Skyworth Group.

The latter makes TVs, digital set-top boxes, refrigerators and washing machines. But let's not mock it, because it’s partly following in the footsteps of fellow Chinese competitor Geely. This firm started out manufacturing refrigerator parts in the mid-1980s, and today is the owner or major shareholder of Volvo, Polestar, Smart, and Lotus.

The BE11 EV is a mid-size SUV, the first of several models headed this way. Skywell plans to have fifty UK-based dealers by the end of 2025, with a fifth already up and running.

On the face of it, the BE11 looks like it ticks plenty of boxes – and we've got our hands on a model.

So, does Skywell have a bright, blue-sky future?

At A Glance

During the first inspection, the BE11 doesn’t look out of place. As is becoming the norm with electric cars, its front end features a clean design, with no grille or grille-like panel – just blank space, accommodating Skywell’s badge in the middle.

Some angular silver pieces of cladding lower down appear to accommodate air intakes, a chrome splitter, and headlights pointing outwards into the middle, neatly hugging the bonnet line at the top.

The sides feature a horizontal crease through the middle of the door handles, a modest bulge lower down, and grey cladding running along the bottom of the bodywork, including the wheel arches.

One handy feature is that even the door sills open with the doors, so there’s less bodywork to dirty your ankles on.

The rear looks good, thanks to a thick horizontal light bar linking the taillights, including illuminated Skywell lettering.

The large tailgate extends just above the bumper, while a hefty roof spoiler overhangs the rear windscreen, including the sides.

Large fog lights and some thick silver cladding complete the look.

Overall, it’s not bad, but slightly lacking in personality. It is not horrific – just relatively tame with little to distinguish it from anything else.

Key Features

Only one trim level is offered on the Skywell BE11, so everything is included as standard – and the equipment list is rather generous.

It has 19-inch alloys, a 12.8-inch infotainment touchscreen with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, leather-style upholstery, six-way electrically adjustable front seats, 128-colour ambient lighting, and automatic air conditioning.

You also get LED headlights, a panoramic sunroof, rear privacy glass, an intelligent entry key, a wireless phone charger, a Metz sound system, and push-button start.

In terms of power, the electric motor produces 204PS. Notably, Skywell has completely changed the motor, which is provided by BYD - another Chinese manufacturer that recently came to the UK.

Range & Batteries

Two versions of the Skywell BE11 are offered – Standard Range and Long Range.

The former has a 72kWh battery and a 248-mile range, while the latter has an 86kWh battery and is capable of a claimed 304 miles.

We say 'capable of', but you won’t achieve these figures in practice, as real-world range depends on many factors, including ambient temperature and driving style.

If you choose the larger battery, expect to achieve the range of the standard battery.

Performance & Drive

The BE11 gets from 0-62mph in 9.6 seconds, topping out at 93mph.

While not lightning-quick and slower than some competitors, it should still be adequate for most.

However, actually getting a response from the car is sluggish. Most electric cars respond instantly, delivering a big dollop of power all in one go, pinning you back in your seat, even if its 0-62mph time doesn’t suggest this.

The BE11, however, has a curious delay of around a second. This lag may be familiar to combustion-engined automatic car drivers, so it may not be an issue, but it’s more common when already moving and changing down - most automatics tend to pull away from a standing start without such a delay.

In the BE11, if you're moving out of a junction or onto a busy roundabout where fractions of a second count, it could be frustrating to live with - particularly given that the delayed responsiveness is unnecessary, as evidenced by any other electric car.

When the acceleration does kick in, it easily overwhelms the front tyres’ grip, causing wheelspin. This may have been due to the specific tyres of our test car, though. It may cope better on our roads with more familiar brands, but the tardy acceleration is perplexing.

Once things have settled down, you’ll notice the accelerator pedal becomes very sensitive, making it harder to gauge how much force to apply with your right foot. Likewise, the brakes suffer from equivalent issues.

When in Comfort mode, nothing seems to happen until you push the pedal a fair way in. After that, much like the accelerator, it’s difficult to judge how much further you need to push to apply an appropriate braking force.

Putting the car in Sports mode reverses the problem, making it extra sensitive and abrupt. To circumvent this, we set the regenerative braking system to the maximum, so we didn’t need to use the brake pedal as much, but that, too, felt excessively fierce.

In terms of handling, the steering wheel lacks feedback, and there’s a dead zone in the middle, meaning you must turn it more than expected to get the required response from the front wheels. That means it takes more effort to keep it in a straight line.

There is also a lack of sensitivity and precision around corners, which doesn't make for much fun around faster bends. Mind you, you won’t want to take bends quickly at all, as there’s plenty of body lean if you overdo it. Granted, few family SUVs in this segment are exciting to drive, but the Skywell is still an outlier.

Looking more positively, the light steering makes it easy to manoeuvre at low speeds around villages and town centres. The ride comfort is absorbing, too, thanks to a soft suspension setup, so it’s adept at smoothing out potholes and indentations in the road surface. 

Charging

The BE11 charges at a maximum speed of 80kW – that would have been notable a few years ago, but not now.

A 20-70% top-up takes 36-minutes in the Standard Range and 45-minutes in the Long-Range version at its maximum charging rate. A 7kW home wall box takes around four-and-a-half hours to achieve the same.

That all sounds okay – but beware of the marketing tactic: most manufacturers quote a 10-80% time at full speed and a 0-100% time for home charging, not 20-70% for both.

Running Costs & Emissions

Of course, one benefit of driving a Skywell is that it has no petrol (or diesel) prices and no CO2 emissions.

That makes it attractive as a company car, given that the Benefit In Kind tax favours zero-emissions vehicles. However, you could say the same about any electric car – and there’s no shortage nowadays.

Reliability is a complete unknown, but servicing is every year or 15,000 miles, whichever comes first.

Interior & Technology

At first glance, the BE11's interior looks very attractive.

Our test car includes wood veneer on the dashboard and doors. The rest of the cabin is bathed in soft-to-the-touch, plush materials and a combination of silver décor and piano black trim, which includes a rotary gear selector.

Even the steering wheel looks quite inviting with its thumb indentations and flattened bottom. What’s more, the large, 12.8-inch infotainment touchscreen takes a commanding position on top of the dashboard.

Some materials seem quite fragile, with plenty of thin plastics for buttons that feel undamped to press. The door handles are light, too.

The infotainment system can also be an exasperating experience, too. Its Caacoo OS software is slow and unintuitive to use, with some options buried deep within submenus after submenus.

Skywell says SatNav will be included soon, but the system lacks over-the-air updates, so early customers may have to do without them.

Yes, you could use navigation via Apple CarPlay or Android Auto instead, but they’re a pain to set up. Using those means you’d normally miss out on the functionality of being able to display the navigation directions on the digital instrument display behind the wheel, but even Skywell's own operating system can't do that.

There's no volume knob, and when using Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, you need to travel from one menu to another to adjust it.

And, you guessed it, adjusting the cabin temperature is also fiddly. The air conditioning controls are concealed within the touchscreen and can’t even be accessed while using the Apple or Android systems, so you have to exit out of them first.

Although the display is crisply clear when using the default operating system, the sharpness goes away when using Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

When you consider that Renault - whose similarly priced Scenic E-Tech rivals the BE11 - now uses Google-derived systems, the contrast is stark.

At least the 12.3-inch digital instrument display behind the wheel is customisable, attractive, and displays a variety of information.

Overall, it’s a nice-looking but flawed interior.

Practicality & Boot Space

The Skywell BE11 is quite spacious inside, offering lots of headroom and, for most people, legroom.

However, this car isn't suitable for very tall drivers as the seats don't slide that far back.

But, assuming you're not lofty, finding a good driving position is easy, as electric seat adjustment is included as standard.

The steering wheel has a decent level of adjustment, the seats are comfortable, and the driving position is pleasingly high. It offers good forward visibility and a reasonably commanding view of the road ahead.

The back offers even more space, with plenty of legroom and headroom, helped by the roofline's minimal slope.

The rear seats can tilt, too, and the added convenience of a flat floor and okay legroom means backseat passengers can spread their legs out and get comfortable. It is actually very impressive.

Unfortunately, there’s a slight catch - the large rear sacrifices some boot space, which is reduced to 467 litres. That is still not bad, though, and roughly in the same ballpark as the Hyundai Kona Electric and Kia Niro EV. But a Skoda Enyaq offers 585 litres, while a Tesla Model Y has a gargantuan 854 litres.

A cargo capacity of 467 litres should be sufficient for the weekly shop, and if you need more, the rear seats can be folded down in a 60:40 configuration to increase the available space to 1,141 litres.

There is some underfloor storage for charging cables, but unlike some electric cars, there's no front boot. The boot floor isn’t adjustable, either, so you’ll have to live with the loading lip. However, there's a powered tailgate, and the cargo area is nicely squared off in shape.

The roller blind in the boot that conceals your belongings feels very flimsy, though, and there are no hooks or tie-down points to secure your stuff.

Thankfully, there’s a good amount of interior storage, including accommodating door pockets, a centre console cubby, a tray, and a couple of cupholders.

Safety

The BE11 hasn’t been tested by Euro NCAP and, given Skywell hasn’t explicitly stated its intentions, we’re questioning whether it ever will.

Skywell may have its reasons, as it’s doubtful the BE11 would get a five-star rating.

Rather than talk about what safety features it does have, what it lacks is concerning. For example, this is the first brand-new car we’ve tested in a long time without automatic emergency braking.

Many safety features we've taken for granted on new cars in recent years are notable by their absence, such as traffic sign recognition, lane keep assist, and so on.

You do, at least, get front and rear parking sensors, a high-definition reversing camera, a 360-degree around-view monitor, ABS brakes, traction control, cruise control, and active park assist.

It won’t be unsafe, that’s for sure – it wouldn’t be allowed on our roads if it was – but the list of cars that would outscore it for safety will be plentiful.

Options

There is no options list for the Skywell BE11 in the UK.

There are four choices for the body colour, though, including metallic black, grey, and blue or solid white.

Rival Cars

The Skywell BE11 is going up against a plethora of more established competitors.

As we've already mentioned, there are the Hyundai Kona, Kia Niro, Renault Scenic, and Skoda Enyaq.

Alternatively, the Nissan Ariya, Ford Explorer, Volkswagen ID.4, Peugeot E-5008, and the Omoda E5 - another recent Chinese entry to the UK - are also worth considering.

Those looking at the premium end of the car leasing market should consider a Tesla Model Y.

Verdict & Next Steps

Overall, the Skywell BE11 just doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

It has a reasonable range, it’s practical (unless you’re a very tall driver), comes with generous equipment levels, it’s competitively priced, and looks nice inside and out.

But it's uninspired to drive. The BE11’s build quality is questionable; it takes ages to respond to accelerator inputs, offers poor handling, and sometimes has a jerky ride.

The infotainment system’s limitations and clunkiness are a big negative, especially as it’s key to so many of a car’s functions nowadays.

The shortage of driving assistance technology do little to inspire confidence, particularly the absence of automatic emergency braking, which is virtually unheard of nowadays.

If your main priorities are a big car and a nice-looking interior, then it's worth considering. But in just about every other area, it falls short - and there are better alternatives to lease for similar money or even less.

Considering Skywell has barely made a car before, it’s a half-decent first effort, but its inexperience shows.

The company will need time to find its feet and deliver serious improvements if it is to become a credible car manufacturer in the UK market.

Where to next?

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**Score based on Select’s unique meta score analysis, taking into account the UK’s top leading independent car website reviews of the Nissan Qashqai.

**Correct as of 07/02/2025. Based on 9 months initial payment, 5,000 miles annually, over a 48 month lease. Initial payment equivalent to 9 monthly payments, or £5,550.48  (Plus admin fee) Ts and Cs apply. Credit is subject to status.