Imagine it’s November, the sales are on, and someone at Toyota has accidentally knocked an extra zero off the price list.

Because the Toyota bZ7 has just landed in China and—brace yourself—it’s cheaper than a mildly specced city hatchback in some places, yet it’s longer than a Tesla Model S. Yes. Bigger than the big Tesla. For less money than a Tesla Model 3.

Naturally, people lost their minds. Three thousand orders in an hour. That’s not a launch, that’s a stampede.

And you can see why. It’s enormous. Properly enormous. The sort of car you’d expect to find a chauffeur in, not a price tag that makes you check if someone’s made a typo. Under the skin, it’s not a tyre-shredding lunatic—278 horsepower means it won’t rip your face off—but it will glide you along for up to 440 miles (on the optimistic Chinese test cycle, mind you) and recharge fast enough to make your tea go cold before it’s done.

Inside? Oh, it’s gone full spaceship. There’s a massive screen, another screen, a head-up display, and seats so pampered they’ll heat you, cool you, and knead your back like an overenthusiastic masseuse. The software comes courtesy of Huawei running HarmonyOS, and it even talks to your house via Xiaomi. So yes, you can turn your lights off from your car, presumably while sitting in traffic wondering where it all went wrong.

And then there’s the safety kit. Lidar, radars, cameras—27 sensors in total. Twenty-seven! That’s not a car, that’s a rolling IT department. It’ll either keep you incredibly safe or, ten years from now, give your local mechanic a nervous twitch.

So what’s the catch? Well, it’s built for China, where EV competition is so fierce that bargains like this are almost normal. Almost. Because this feels less like a sensible car launch and more like Toyota turning up to a knife fight with a flamethrower.

The result? A huge, tech-laden electric limo for the price of something much, much smaller.

Blimey.