We all know that Build Your Dreams (BYD) loves a gimmick. You only have to look at the likes of the Seal U or Sealion 7, with their rotating 15.6-inch infotainment screens, to pick up on the Chinese company's playful attitude to tech.
And it surely doesn't take much deductive reasoning to work out that BYD is clearly trying to target Tesla, the original EV disruptor brand, with its own bundle of tricks - remember, you can get various Teslas to perform light shows to music, or simulate fart noises in the cabin, among the more frivolous details.
A recent trip to BYD's newest test-ground facility, located next to its factory just outside the city of Zhengzhou in China, gave us a chance to see the next wave of BYD group products - scheduled to arrive in Europe under the Denza and Yangwang brands. And if you think swivelling touchscreens are fancy, then wait until you get a load of this lot of weird and wonderful gear...
The Denza B8 SUV and its roof-mounted drone
First up is surely something for the amateur filmmakers among our ranks. The Denza B8 is a large, luxurious, seven-seat SUV that fits into the world somewhere between the hard-working Toyota Land Cruiser and the opulent Land Rover Defender.
Having briefly sampled it on an off-road course, it's incredibly capable and remarkably comfortable, even when you're doing massive axle articulation in it in a concrete half-pipe, negotiating it across an ominously creaky see-saw bridge, or even driving it down a set of steps like you're a cut-price Jason Bourne in an action movie.
Surely enough to make the B8 stand out in a sea of deluxe SUVs in the first place, you'd think. But BYD thinks otherwise. An option for this vehicle is a roof-mounted pod, which opens up a bit like one of the 'Facehugger' eggs in the Alien movie series and disgorges a flying drone.
This can be remote-controlled by an occupant (not the driver, obvs) to film the car from above as it drives along a challenging and/or picturesque road. And apart from getting you some pure 'Gram gold footage as a result, we're not sure what purpose this thing serves at all.
Still, at least it doesn't detract from rear passenger headroom or boot space. So, there's that, we suppose.
The Denza Z9 GT EV and its ability to walk like a crab, and turn like a tank
Moving on to the plush, electric Denza Z9 GT shooting brake. Its three-motor 'e3' propulsion set-up allows it to perform two extraordinary feats - although neither of them will do your tyres any good whatsoever.
The more useful of these parlour tricks is the tank turn. With independently steering rear wheels, a dedicated electric motor for each and a front axle that'll send all the power to one wheel only, the Denza Z9 GT EV can pivot on its own axis so you can turn it around in incredibly tight spaces.
All it requires to do this is to tap a few buttons on the large central touchscreen and then tell the car the way you want it to pivot. It then angles its rear wheels accordingly and throws torque at the one relevant front wheel, and round the car goes - without the vehicle moving backwards and forwards at all. Mind, the screeching of tortured rubber that accompanies this manoeuvre is notably less than pleasant.
The other gimmick here is the crab walk and we have no idea what this could reasonably be used for, save for that unlikely scenario where you've been drafted into a giant game of car chess and you've been asked to be one of the bishops.
Essentially, with crab walk engaged, the Denza will turn all its four wheels in the same direction and travel diagonally. It's an utterly bizarre sensation to drive the car like this, because you have to input a full quarter-turn of steering lock to get the system to work (having selected the mode on the central touchscreen) - so your steering wheel is pointing off to the right at 90 degrees, but the car is moving (sort of) forwards and sideways at the same time.
About the best way we can describe this sensation is if you've ever been in a car with knackered tracking or a bent steering arm, where you have to steer to one side or the other by quite a few degrees just to keep the car in a straight line, it's like that.
And if the Z9 is in crab walk and you put too much steering lock in, it starts to veer out of crab walk and into plain four-wheel steering, arcing off to the left or right accordingly.
The suggestion is that this feature would work for nipping through narrow gaps in slow-moving, city traffic, or even manoeuvring into or out of a tight parking space. But we can't see either working, frankly.
The Yangwang U9 supercar and the hidden 'jump' scare
While we were standing in the pits at the BYD facility in China, we kept hearing loud thudding noises. And because we weren't looking at what made them, initially we weren't sure what was going on.
But the Yangwang U9 supercar has fancy suspension called 'DiSus-X intelligent active body control'. This is a system designed to keep the shell of the car as level as possible when driving, but it has the spin-off side-talent of being able to make the U9 dance if you want it to (bobbing up and down independently at its four corners, as demonstrated by BYD CEO Stella Li during a later press conference we attended) or even jump in the air.
That's right, jump. The Yangwang will do a standing bunny hop, which is what was happening in the pits - the loud thumping was the car landing back on the surface of the Earth. That particular usage of the feature is, of course, nothing more than pure street theatre, but a later promotional video showed the real function of the U9's ability to leap in the air: if you encounter a huge pothole in the road surface at speed, the Yangwang can jump before it hits the imperfection, clear the danger and then land on the other side, keeping your expensive 21-inch alloy wheels intact.
Mind, we're sure that would take other road users by surprise, the first time they see the car in action, gliding through the air...
The Yangwang U8 luxury SUV and its swimming skills
By far our favourite gimmick of all these Denzas and Yangwangs belongs to the Range-Rover-rivalling Yangwang U8 SUV. It has been widely publicised already that this car can do what we're about to say, but in essence, this SUV will swim.
It's not, technically, being marketed as an amphibious machine, though; a 2020s thematic follow-up to the Schwimmwagen, Amphicar or Gibbs Aquada. Instead, Yangwang views the 'wade' function of the U8 as an emergency safety feature.
To demonstrate this, it invited us to get into a U8 sitting with all its windows open, but its full-length sunroof closed. Then, as passengers, we watched agape as the car drove down a shallow slope straight into something akin to an outdoor swimming pool... and promptly floated, all four wheels off the deck, in 1.7 metres of water. It automatically detects that you've gone into deep water in these circumstances and quickly closes all the windows while opening the sunroof - so you've got an escape path out of the car.
Not that you'd want to get out while this aquatic magic is going on. Incredibly, while the Yangwang U8 has four electric motors in each of its wheels, it's still not a pure EV but in fact a range-extending hybrid with a small combustion engine under the bonnet.
This leads the Yangwang to have a somewhat 'nose-down' attitude while it is sailing along, which does look a bit alarming if you're viewing the SUV's lengths of the pool from the outside, but it won't sink due to the way the body is sealed. What's remarkable is that the water, which is sloshing about the base of the door mirrors and lapping up to the bottom of the windscreen during our demonstration of the tech, does not get into the range-extending engine's air intake and ruin the drivetrain.
The Yangwang U8 is piloted in the water using nothing more than the steering wheel and accelerator pedal. The electric motors in each wheel work as both propulsion and 'rudders' in this circumstance, altering their torque independently to turn the vehicle in response to the driver/pilot/captain of the ship/SUV spinning the steering wheel.
You'll have seen videos of the U8 in action in the water but actually experiencing it was our favourite tech-demo of the day - and it has genuine uses. Not that you'll want to willingly and regularly drive the car into deeper waters, you understand; it'll apparently only sail for 30 minutes before overheating its drivetrain, and it was intimated to us that customer cars would need a proper dealer-approved reset after each and every dip into the wet stuff.
But should you find yourself needing to cross a deep stream or river for some reason, or you live in an area where flash floods are a common occurrence, then this feature would undoubtedly be a massive help.
Brilliantly, one journalist asked the Yangwang representatives what the maximum wading depth of the U8 was. And, to puzzled looks from all involved, the answer was 'infinite'. It's the time the motors can function for that ultimately limits the U8's swimming abilities, not the depth of water in which it is floating.
The Denza Z and its disappearing steering wheel
A very quick one here, as we didn't see the Denza Z 'in the metal' at Zhengzhou, but rather on a video shown in the same press conference where Stella Li (eventually) got a Yangwang U9 to dance on stage by only using voice commands uttered into her smartphone.
Anyway, the Z is an incoming Porsche 911 and Maserati GranTurismo electric competitor - probably having more than the 950hp or so the tri-motor Z9 GT EV has, but less than the 1,306hp of the Yangwang U9. Because remember, 'Yangwang > Denza' in the BYD hierarchy.
Nevertheless, this 2+2 zero-emission sports coupe is only just at the announcement stage right now, as it was previewed at the recent Shanghai motor show. Details are therefore thin on the ground, but one of its features is drive-by-wire steering and an autopilot mode.
This apparently means that the Denza Z will then fold its steering wheel away into the dashboard, which is a properly sci-fi piece of technology that's sure to terrify unwitting passengers the first time you deploy the autopilot.
Conclusion
It would be easy to cynically scoff at some of the technology we saw from BYD, Denza and Yangwang, if it weren't for the fact that every example of this gimmicky tech was attached to a promising-looking vehicle in each instance.
The B8 seems like a nicely styled and well-built big SUV regardless of the pointless drone on its roof, while the Z9 GT EV drives rather well and looks good, so whether you use its bizarre and tyre-torturing crab walk and tank turn features or not, it should find plenty of European fans.
Whether anyone will ever get the Yangwang U9 to successfully vault a pothole while travelling at 100km/h and more, or genuinely be able to use the Denza Z's foldaway steering wheel under local legislation pertaining to self-driving cars on public roads are, admittedly, both moot points - because the vehicles themselves look incredibly appealing for enthusiasts.
But by far the best and most worthy tech we saw from this Chinese group was the Yangwang U8's wading ability. So while you can dismiss much of what we've seen here as nothing more than mildly amusing gimmickry, the swimming luxury SUV from the BYD group is clearly something of a jaw-dropping USP that should see it picking up healthy sales numbers here in Europe, when the vehicle is eventually launched. Land ho!