Sweden's advertising ombudsman, Reklamombudsmannen, ruled on 5 August 2026 that a BYD commercial breached the ICC marketing code. The film showed a person on skis being towed at speed behind a BYD Sealion 7 across a snowy landscape — a stunt intended to demonstrate the car's winter traction and stability.
The panel found the advert in breach of Articles 1 and 21 of the code, which cover social and professional responsibility and the depiction of dangerous activity.
What BYD argued, and why it did not work
BYD's defence was the standard one for this category of complaint: the sequence was filmed in a controlled test environment, by people who knew what they were doing, and the film carried small on-screen text saying so.
The panel was unpersuaded, and its reasoning is the part worth reading. Demonstrating a car's winter capability by towing a skier behind it at speed could not, in the panel's view, be justified on educational or public-interest grounds. It also singled out the soundtrack, finding that the music reinforced a nonchalant attitude toward the risk rather than framing it as a professional stunt.
That is a familiar pattern in self-regulatory rulings across Europe. A disclaimer is treated as a mitigating detail, not a defence. The question the panel asks is what an ordinary viewer takes away from the film as a whole — and a small line of text competing with music and footage of someone being towed on skis loses that contest.
What the ruling actually does
Reklamombudsmannen is a self-regulatory body. It cannot fine BYD and it cannot order the advert pulled. What it issues is a published finding that the marketing breached the industry's own code.
In the Nordic market that carries more weight than the absence of a penalty suggests. Rulings are published, trade press covers them, and media buyers pay attention. The usual outcome is that the advert quietly stops running.
What it means for BYD's European push
BYD is in the middle of the most aggressive European expansion of any Chinese carmaker. It matched Tesla's European market share for the first time in H1 2026, and it is pushing into segments and price points across the continent — most recently pricing the seven-seat Ti7 for the UK.
Rapid expansion means rapid marketing, and marketing produced for one regulatory culture does not always survive contact with another. Europe has a dense, country-by-country layer of advertising self-regulation with genuinely different sensitivities: what reads as an energetic capability demo in one market reads as promoting dangerous behaviour in another. Sweden, with a large winter-driving population and a long-standing road-safety consensus, is exactly the market where a ski-tow stunt was most likely to draw a complaint.
For a brand still building trust with European buyers, the cost here is not the ruling. It is being the carmaker that had to explain why it filmed someone being dragged behind a car.