Chinese auto makers worked hard to shake off the “cheap junk” label. For years, they proved they could build reliable, modern cars. Then a video came along that made everyone forget those gains in a heartbeat.
Last week, social media exploded. The subject? A BYD Tang driving down a road in Shenyang. The weather was atrocious. Heavy rain. Flooded streets. The car looked normal enough. Until you looked at the rear.
Hanging off the back, held on by nothing but a single wire, was the electric motor. It dangled there, useless and exposed, while the SUV kept moving forward. Did a few inches of water knock off a $3,000 component? That’s the obvious question. It’s also the wrong one.
The Underbody Collision Theory
Common sense suggests that shallow flood water doesn’t just rip drivetrains off their mounts. Water has weight, yes. But it’s soft. It doesn’t have teeth. If the water was only an inch or two deep—as the video suggests—the force alone couldn’t have severed a high-torque electric motor from a unibody chassis.
Unless the car wasn’t just driving through the water. Unless it was driving over something.
BYD has stepped in with an explanation that shifts the blame from weather to impact. The company states the vehicle suffered a severe underbody collision while wading through the deeper portions of the flood.
The Tang didn’t lose its motor because of the rain. It lost it because it hit the bottom.
This implies the road wasn’t just flooded. It was likely obstructed or severely degraded. The driver may have plowed into debris, a submerged object, or simply hit a dip in the asphalt that slammed the undercarriage hard. By the time the car emerged into open water, the motor housing was already compromised.
Still Moving: A Front-Wheel Drive Ghost
What makes this incident bizarre—and technically fascinating—is that the car kept driving.
Photos shared by CarNewsChina show the reality of the damage. The rear motor’s casing is shattered. It’s dangling by a single orange high-voltage cable, a tangle of wires that shouldn’t be carrying power to a disconnected unit. Yet, the vehicle was operational.
How? Because it was a dual-motor BYD Tang EV. With the rear unit gone, the SUV effectively became a front-wheel-drive car. The front motor did all the work. It dragged the dead weight of the rear assembly behind it.
Is this a testament to engineering resilience or a mechanical horror story? Probably both.
The Financial Fallout
For the owner of this Tang, the video went viral for all the wrong reasons. But the real pain will hit the wallet.
BYD confirmed it contacted the owner and conducted an inspection. Replacement parts for these units are not cheap. Labor for electric vehicle drivetrains is specialized and costly. If the insurance company denies the claim based on “wear and tear” or negligence (driving a compromised vehicle further), the owner is on the hook for a massive bill.
The stereotype of Chinese manufacturing being prone to cheap failures is alive and well in the public imagination. One video. One dangling motor. That’s all it takes to reset the narrative.
But the facts don’t support a build-quality failure here. They point to impact.
The car is still on the road, limp but moving, trailing its own severed heart behind it. It’s a stark reminder of what happens when the barrier between the street and the drivetrain disappears in a split second. We can all laugh at the image. It’s absurd. It’s dramatic. But the repair bill? That’s going to be anything but funny.
