What the court decided
On 11 November the court ruled against JLR and ordered the destruction of the seized digital records, which reportedly included launch plans and technical data. Within 24 hours of destroying them, JLR must give BYD third-party confirmation that the material is gone.
The penalty structure is plain arithmetic. At €50,000 an hour, the €500,000 ceiling is reached after ten hours of delay.
According to Electrek's report on the ruling, the court dismissed JLR's bid to have BYD fined €500,000 for alleged non-compliance with the seizure order, and found provisionally that BYD had cooperated. The court also barred JLR from further legal steps under the original seizure order. BYD was ordered to pay €25,376.57 in legal costs.
How the seizure happened
In August, Dutch authorities acting for JLR raided BYD's offices in the Netherlands without warning and took digital records. JLR argues the Ti 7 is a "slavish imitation" of the Defender and says BYD stripped a Defender down to reverse-engineer parts of its technology.
BYD says it cooperated with JLR's requests before the raid. Its lawyers called the seizure a "fishing expedition" and argued that too many files were taken.
Why the documents had to go
The reasoning matters more than the fine. According to Autoweek Netherlands, the court found JLR did not need the material because the Ti 7 has not been sold in the European Union.
That is a territorial argument, and it fits the launch plan. BYD opened UK orders for the Ti 7 in late July, in a single trim called Excellence AWD. The model has stayed a British proposition. Design protection runs country by country, and the UK regime has operated separately from the EU's since Brexit.
Chinese manufacturers are pushing into Europe at very different speeds by market. We looked at that uneven progress in our coverage of the TML report for ACEA on EU e-mobility.
The price gap behind the complaint
The commercial argument is easier to follow than the legal one. The Ti 7 starts at £47,995 on the road in the UK. The plug-in Defender 110 starts at £71,840. That is a difference of £23,845, or about 33 percent, on two seven-seat SUVs with off-road styling.
The Ti 7 is the first UK model on BYD's DM-p powertrain: three electric motors and a 1.5-litre turbocharged petrol engine, 402 hp (408 PS), 0–62 mph in 4.8 seconds. A 35.6 kWh Blade battery gives a WLTP electric range of up to 74 miles, or 102 miles in city running.
Those two figures let you check the efficiency claim yourself. At 35.6 kWh for 119 km of WLTP electric range, the car works out at roughly 29.9 kWh/100 km on the electric cycle, calculated on gross pack capacity. Expect worse in winter and at motorway speed; plug-in range figures are measured on a cycle that flatters them.
Cost follows from that. At a home tariff of €0.25/kWh, 29.9 kWh/100 km comes to about €7.48 per 100 km. On public DC charging at €0.60/kWh it is roughly €17.94 per 100 km. You can run your own tariff through our charging cost calculator, and compare motorway prices against the cheapest sites in our supercharger database, which currently lists 483 locations across Europe.
Charging speed at home is the practical catch for a plug-in with a pack this size. An 11 kW wallbox needs about 3.5 hours for 35.6 kWh, and a 7.4 kW unit closer to 4.8 hours, before losses. Higher-power home DC hardware is arriving, as we reported with Lunar's 25 kW home DC charger, but most buyers will still plan around overnight charging.
What happens next
JLR has already begun summary proceedings over the alleged infringement in Rotterdam and The Hague. No court has yet ruled on whether the Ti 7 copies the Defender. The order from The Hague concerns evidence and access to files, not the design question itself.
For buyers in Britain, the legal fight has not interrupted sales: the Ti 7 remains on offer at £47,995 in Excellence AWD trim. BYD has not announced an EU launch for the model, and the Dutch court's reasoning rested on that absence.