The video proving Huawei and JAC's $140,000 luxury van lost its brakes during testing disappeared from every major Chinese platform within a day. Nobody will say who took it down.
Bilibili, WeChat Channels, Weibo, Douyin: the original Dongchedi footage, showing three Maextro V800s failing emergency stop tests, vanished from all of them by October 9. Each platform gave a different excuse, "invalid post," "violates rules," "doesn't exist," but Dongchedi itself says nobody told them why or who ordered it. Even China's state news agency Xinhua reposted the carmaker's official response, then deleted it hours later without explanation.
At the same time, a separate video went viral showing the Dongchedi app refusing to play the test footage, but only on Huawei phones, with a message saying the feature was "coming soon." Open the exact same video on an iPhone, and it plays right away. People online joked that Huawei was "hijacking" its own phones to hide the story. Huawei and Dongchedi say that part is just a boring software bug, an unfinished update that blocks a certain type of video on Huawei phones in general, not this one specifically. Reporters tested it and found the bug does affect unrelated videos too.
So one piece of this really might just be bad software. The other part, five different platforms quietly erasing the same video with nobody taking responsibility, is a lot harder to explain away as a coincidence.
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Three brand-new luxury vans worth $140,000 each lost their brakes completely during emergency stop tests. All three failed the same way.
The Maextro V800, a Huawei and JAC Motors collaboration, hit the market in August at up to a million yuan. In early October, Chinese outlet Dongchedi ran closed-track emergency braking tests on three different V800s from separate production batches. Every single one suffered the exact same failure: the plastic bracket holding the brake pedal cracked after just 2 to 4 hard stops. Once it broke, the foot brake stopped working entirely. Testers had to rely on the emergency parking-gear brake instead, a function the manual itself warns can cause loss of control. Stopping distance roughly tripled.
Dongchedi says this wasn't an extreme stress test, just standard emergency braking. Their analysis found the pedal bracket had a longer lever arm than typical, only a single reinforcing layer where comparable vehicles use two or three, and visible stress points from the manufacturing process. Competitor vehicles tested the same way didn't fail.
The market reaction was immediate. JAC Motors stock hit its daily limit-down the next trading day, wiping out about $870 million in value in a single session.
Maextro's response: the braking system exceeds national safety standards, no failures have been reported in real-world customer use, and they're offering free "optional" upgrades, not a recall. Critics say a safety-critical part with a confirmed design flaw should trigger a real recall, not a voluntary fix buyers have to request themselves.
A million-yuan vehicle, marketed as safe and premium, lost its brakes on command, three times in a row.
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