One of the strangest invitations we received this year was for the unveil of a new electric car, complete with rockets, from a Chinese company better known for making vacuums and toothbrushes. Dwayne Wade and Steve Wozniak would be there, we were told, as if their presence would somehow make up for the fact that everything they promised sounded basically impossible.
This is the challenge of interfacing with the Chinese car industry in general. It’s true that Chinese car companies have been able to build competitive — and frankly almost unbelievable — EVs with amazing features on a faster timeline than anyone expected, like the Xiaomi SU7 that’s setting ‘Ring records. It’s also true that more startup Chinese car brands have failed than succeeded. It’s been a wild, and also very short ride for this one.
To be clear, Dreame is an absolutely real company that produces a lot of popular products in China, so could this be the next Xiaomi? That was the question on our minds when we heard what they were planning. The more specifics we heard, though, the more fantastical it all sounded.
Here’s a slide from the company:
Wow, 0-62 MPH in just 0.9 seconds. That’s fast. Too fast. It’s also generally only achievable by a car that large if you add a rocket. Apparently, they were adding rockets. This is the Nebula NEXT 01 JET Edition, which was supposed to be the first production car sold with the full Wernher Braun treatment.
Being highly skeptical, we sent an automotive engineer friend of ours to go check it out, and he brought back some interesting photos, including of said “rockets” on the Nebula NEXT:
Yup, those are rockets. Actually, the car doesn’t look so bad. A closer look at the “rockets” revealed that, like Carmelo Anthony, they weren’t really rockets:
“These influencers,” our man sighed. “’The world’s first production concept car with rockets’ … wut. Nope. I can’t see anything that gives me the fizz. Not even logos on the calipers. These could easily be in the next F&F movie and then become peg warmer Hot Wheels at your local Walmart. Like … why put a carbon fiber surround on a rocket exhaust?”
“There are no gaps around the rockets. Everything has been blocked by plastic covers. Feels like horseshit … there are no air inlets, no air outlets, all grilles are decorative and are blocked off, red car has the rockets, and they have carbon fiber cases? No mention of fueling, cool down, etc. It doesn’t look to me like they’re real rockets, just that they’re fab’d to look like rockets … They’re saying they’re functional, but it’s hard to see how that’s possible given the presentation here.”
Commenters, too, weren’t convinced, with Erik Hancock writing:
Hilarious. Those nozzles look like the sort of things a kid draws – a mishmash of a bunch of different technologies they don’t understand but that look badass. Those nozzles are not from a rocket, but from a jet engine. They’ve got variable-geometry “turkey feathers” that suggest afterburners as well as the tailcone that is typically part of the turbine assembly – as opposed to an actual rocket that is just a plain nozzle with no central suspended assembly.
Here’s Dreame explaining the rockets in a slide:
Our engineer basically left feeling like this whole automotive thing was just a ploy to get people to care about all the stuff Dreame currently makes:
China is at the cutting edge of EV development, so even if these two concepts were just design-bucks, there’s a possibility that Dreame could either build them or simply use them to showcase tech they’ll sell to someone else.
Or they’re just complete vaporware there to get people talking about the brand. Who the heck knows.
That skepticism was well earned and now we have what seems like an answer: Dreame is reportedly getting out of the industry before it ever sells a single car to anyone. Car News China has the dirt on what happened:
[I]nternal sources suggest the project was more about marketing and fundraising than genuine manufacturing. Former employees revealed to China Economy that the “supercar” model shown at CES lacked a chassis and was moved via remote control. The “Rocket Car” model was allegedly purchased from a Shanghai-based model company for several million yuan (hundreds of thousands USD) and modified with a chassis and thrusters to create a visual effect for the cameras.
Insiders further claimed that the company’s operational logic was inverted, instead of investing in R&D to create a product, employees were required to secure funding first before R&D budgets were allocated. One former employee noted that the company used high salaries and inflated titles to poach talent from established automakers, focusing on financing rather than production.
That’s not ideal.
Guess who absorbed all of this with little skepticism? Influencers, of course. Here’s “911 Reviews” at the same event:
How does this have a million views? What’s bizarre is that the 911Reviews host made it sound like the car is a real thing. “So this doesn’t feel like a car with software added in, it feels like a machine built around software from the start. The AI-driven interface is fluid, responsive, almost predictive. It’s not just reacting, it feels like it’s interpreting” he says in the video, saying it’s like Tesla. He goes on to say “The execution is real, and this car backs it up.”
Except, of course, it seems obvious to me that the car was never real, so how did the host know the AI-driven interface actually worked? The video description does include “This is a sponsored video and the Amazon link is a referral link,” so maybe it was paid promotion. Normally I’d say if something seems sketchy, it probably is, but Chinese automakers have been doing some amazing things. So be careful out there.
Did the company ever plan to build a car? Maybe Dreame was just a little too late to the party. Specifically, the Chinese Communist Party, which is no longer supporting the EV industry like it used to back in the good old days of the early 2020s. Sales are down in China, and the Chinese government is cracking down on bad behavior by automakers.
Given that Dreame is an already seemingly successful company that already has a core business, maybe discretion is the better part of valor here. Or, in the words of another poet: It was all a Dreame…
Top photo: The Autopian
I don’t think anybody really believed it but when you’re a car influencer, this was the ultimate click-bait, engagement story