2025 BYD Yangwang U8 - Luxury SUV | Interior And Exterior

Yangwang U8 review – we drive the world's most powerful SUV
The Yangwang U8 is the most powerful SUV in the world and promises superb off-road capability, range-extender technology – and the ability to float. Here's how it performed in our test drive...

James Bond’s cars were rarely short of gadgets, be that the amphibious Lotus Esprit or the Aston Martin DB5 that could leave rivals spinning on an oil slick.

And with the ability to spin itself 360 degrees on the spot in a "tank turn" manoeuvre and float to navigate flooding, the Yangwang U8 looks to be rekindling the spirit of Q’s secret R&D operations.

This big luxury SUV is the first model from Yangwang (an upmarket Chinese brand owned by BYD) and is similar to the Land Rover Defender and Mercedes G-Class in terms of its focus on go-anywhere ability and sumptuous luxury.

The U8 employs some radical technologies, including one motor powering each wheel that can work independently of the others – enabling that tank turn party piece – and suspension that can keep the SUV stable in the event of a tyre blowout.

There’s no mistaking it for anything else on the road either, with huge clusters of LEDs combining to form vast lighting panels front and rear. The rows of lights on the rear windscreen pillar aren’t just for decoration either, because they can illuminate to show the level of charge.

Oh, and there's another thing: with 1184bhp, the U8 is the world’s most powerful SUV, with an explosive 0-62mph time of 3.6 seconds, which we confirmed in our brief test drive on a track. Yes, you read that right – 3.6 seconds.

What is the Yangwang U8 like to drive?

The first thing to strike you about the U8 is its size. At 5.3m, it’s longer than a Land Rover Defender 130 and a Mercedes G-Class. It’s wide too, but visibility is pretty good, and it’s festooned with parking cameras showing the distances to obstacles in centimetres, making it slightly more wieldy.

Once you're on the move, steering isn't as quick as in a Range Rover Sport and we could feel the car pushing power to each wheel independently as it battled to find grip on our slippery track surface. Given the power available, and that a race track isn’t its natural habitat, it does a fine job. In this regard, it bodes well for the Yangwang U9 sports car, which is likely to use similar technology.

When you corner at speed, there’s a fair degree of pitch and roll, although it’s less flustered in its sports mode. With the suspension in comfort mode it breezed over the smooth race-track Tarmac, although imperfections could still be felt in its more dynamic settings. Still, the U8 does weigh 3.4 tonnes, and there’s only so much technology can do to overcome physics.



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