In 2,978hp Xtreme form, the electric Yangwang U9 supercar has been making headlines for going incredibly fast in a straight line (496kph) and also around the Nürburgring (6min 59sec), but that’s far from its only party trick.
The U9 has parent company BYD’s DiSus-X suspension, an active hydraulic system that allows it to do small jumps on command. BYD pitches this as a way of avoiding potholes, which means that if the U9 ever comes to Metro Manila, it’s likely to spend at least 50% of its time airborne.
Yangwang isn’t the only company bringing a very fancy active suspension to the table, mind you, and the ClearMotion system used by the Nio ET9 might have some more practical real-world uses.
It, too, is a hydraulic system that, among other abilities, keeps the body almost spookily smooth and level when the car is traveling over bumps, and even rocks the car from side to side when stationary to clear off things like snow or leaves. Or really annoy anyone that’s sat inside it.
The Yangwang brand seems to be a testbed for some of BYD’s flashiest tech as much as anything else, as also proven by its massive U8 SUV, a car you might have seen a bit of when a few were brought over for journalists to have a play with a couple of years ago. Among its party tricks are the ability to do a 360-degree on-the-spot ‘tank turn,’ and the capability to float for short amounts of time (and unlike the Tesla Cybertruck, we’ve actually got proper proof it can do this).
The tank turns, though, aren’t unique to the Yangwang: The electric Mercedes G-Class can do them, too, and in both cases, watching it happen will cause anyone with even a modicum of mechanical sympathy to cringe so hard they might actually phase out of existence.
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Denza is another posh sub-brand of the BYD mega-corp, and unlike Yangwang, it’s already debuted in the Philippines. One of its potential offerings, a 1,140hp electric mega-wagon called the Z9 GT, features self-parking tech, which is nothing new in itself, but ups the ante somewhat. If a spot is too tight for a traditional parallel park, it can go into the space nose-first, then use its individual rear-wheel steer system to point both back wheels outwards and drag its backend sideways into the spot like a dog with worms.
Genuinely useful, if once again likely to make you grit your teeth when you think about what it’s doing to your tire tread. The Z9 GT is also able to ‘crab walk’ its way along the road at a diagonal, which…why?
More BYD tech, but this one has the potential to be huge for the whole car industry. The company’s Flash Chargers, of which there’s already a decent network in China and one being rolled out across Europe, use on-site storage batteries to juice up EVs at a rate of up to 1,500kW—over three times quicker than the fastest public chargers currently available in the Philippines.
This, the company says, can top a battery up from 10% to 97% in as little as nine minutes. They’re not BYD-exclusive, either. Basically any modern EV can use them, although there is a catch: The EV itself actually needs to be capable of accepting charge that fast, and so far, only a trio of Denza models can do this.
Nio has taken a different approach to the issue of speeding up the EV charging process: simply swap the empty battery for a fully juiced one, as if the car were a giant TV remote or something. Obviously, it’s not as simple as opening a flap and chucking a couple of new AAs in. It’s a fully automated process that has to be done at dedicated battery-swap stations, although it can take as little as three minutes.
It’s an idea that’s been tried for as long as EVs have been a thing (so almost as long as cars themselves have been a thing, basically), but Nio is the first company to actually roll it out en masse, with a network of swap stations across China and Europe.
Xiaomi, a name you’re likely familiar with from its exploits around the Nürburgring with the SU7 Ultra EV mega-sedan, has only been building cars for a few years. It started out as a maker of smartphones, and that inevitably means a pretty deep level of car-tech integration. The HyperOS operating system its cars run on can be hooked up to roughly 200 different Xiaomi products, including smart home tech, meaning you can do stuff like pre-heating your house from your car. Sounds neat, although as with so much fancy car tech, we question how many people will actually use it.
In its home market (where it has the slightly less catchy name of FangChengBao Bao 8), this chunky PHEV SUV features, as an optional extra, a roof-mounted docking station for a DJI drone that can follow the car at up to 55kph, automatically return to it from anywhere within a 2km radius, and even take off and land when the car’s moving at up to 26kph.
Impressive, and useful if, for some reason, you want some nice drone footage of your own car driving slowly, but otherwise, it feels like another slightly gimmicky ‘because we can’ moment.
Tesla Model X’s Falcon Wing doors not show-offy enough for you? How about this duo of crossovers from EV upstart HiPhi, which split the rear doors into two parts? The bottom half opens as a regular frameless door (just like an old Subaru!), while the top half rises as a tiny gullwing. It all sounds like another gimmick until you look at the admittedly massive entry space this affords rear passengers. It also raises the question of how many doors these cars have. Five? Seven? 3.5? We have no clue.
HiPhi’s other model, an insane-looking fastback sedan-type thing called the Z, doesn’t quite have as fancy rear doors as its stablemate, although they are rear-hinged, à la Rolls-Royce Phantom. What makes the doors really unique here, though, is the fact that they house LED screens that can display words or patterns. We’re not entirely sure if it’ll allow you to broadcast to passing-lane hoggers what you really think of them, or indeed if the Z is still a thing—HiPhi’s parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2024, and the brand’s current status is a bit murky.
Thankfully, if HiPhi is a thing of the past, there are other Chinese cars that’ll allow you to get your strange door fix. The Zeekr Mix, an electric people carrier, features dual sliding doors on each side that open up from the middle like the doors from an old Star Trek episode. Or, you know, your local supermarket. It’s undoubtedly a useful solution for tight spaces and preventing overzealous children from dinging the car next to them, but does an all-sliding door arrangement give anyone else Peugeot 1007 flashbacks?
NOTE: This story first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
