I’m all for being excited about a particular car or kind of car. I want to see and hear from people absolutely smitten with whatever their favorite car is. I want to hear them gush and excitedly point out features and make gleeful videos of them in and around such cars. I want all of that vicarious automotive excitement, grind it up into a powder, and I’ll do the fattest rail of it, through a rolled up $100 bill, off a mirror. But when it takes on weird nationalistic tones or makes baseless claims of dominance over half a world’s car manufacturers, it’s less fun.
Maybe that’s why I feel the urge to let the metaphorical air out of the tires of this pro-Chinese car online influencer and how he portrays the way the Li Auto L9 deals with tires with the air let out.
Specifically, it has to do with a tweet from someone named Yaw who likes to tweet about how great Chinese cars are, and, on its own, that’s fine! Compared to some of the other crap this guy tweets, being pro-cars built in China stuff is great. Chinese companies are making some pretty fantastic cars right now! And I get that they have been subjected to a lot of stigmas about quality, which may explain a certain level of defensiveness. But there’s something about claiming “the game is over for Western car manufacturers” that just makes these sorts of things eye-rolling:
Bro the game is over for Western car manufacturers. ???? pic.twitter.com/wFvjN5oVdW
— yaw. (@yabbanx) April 24, 2026
But, more importantly, the feature highlighted in this tweet as what will end the game for Western car manufacturers: the ability to change a tire without a jack, thanks to articulated wheels. Well, that’s old news. Like, over-70-years-old-level old news, because the first mass-produced car with the ability to do this was introduced in 1955 – the legendary Citroën DS.
It’s literally the exact same party trick being shown in that video of the Li Auto L9, lifting up its injured limb to allow a jackstand to be placed underneath, which then allows the wheel to be replaced without resorting to using a jack to lift and support the car, like how some sort of filthy animal would. The Citroën DS can do this very same thing. Look:
That’s what the 2026 Li Auto did, only Citroën has been doing this, with its hydropneumatic suspension system, since the mid ’50s.
Want to see Jay Leno demonstrate this, too? Sure you do:
Look at that! That’s cool as hell! Sure, it’s still cool when the Li Auto does it, but gotta give credit where it’s due, and our pals at Citroën cracked this nut long ago. Plus, the DS’s hydropneumatic suspension was not only capable of changing the ride height and making jacks obsolete, but it could help the car drive in a controllable manner even when its tires have been shot out.
That’s why the DS is credited with saving former French President Charles De Gaulle from an assassination attempt: his Citroën presidential car was riddled with bullets and had at least three of its tires shot out, but still managed to speed away and ferry him to safety:
The clever suspension of the DS could – and, it’s worth noting, self-leveling suspension of the DS did all these things without any electronic computing devices whatsoever – allow the car to drive on three wheels if necessary.
Don’t just take my word for it – here’s a segment from an episode of CHiPs that features this fascinating ability of the DS!
That’s not some special effect – CHiPs was far too cheap to do anything like that, since they blew all their budget smashing cars into each other – the DS could really drive just fine and level even with a rear wheel missing.
In fact, since we’re already showing videos of DSes doing bonkers things, let’s just go all out and watch a lot of DSes in movie crashes and stunts and whatever:
I suppose we’ve gotten off track a good bit, but I think my point still stands: it’s great to champion the cars you love, and you should! But as soon as you’re posting videos of car features about which you have done zero historical research and proclaiming the end of half the world’s car industry, maybe take a moment and put down the phone and go for a nice drive, instead.
Top graphic images: X; Citroën; Netflix
The Chinese car manufacturers are currently in a gimmicks arms race which reminds me a lot of the smartphone industry in the mid-2010s. More and more features are becoming mainstream (think former “luxuries” like heated/ventilated seats, power adjust seats, a big infotainment display, 360 degree camera) so manufacturers are coming up with increasingly outlandish (and increasingly useless) “features” to stand out. I wish instead they’d focus on dynamics and refinement. I’m hoping over the next few years as every mid-range EV ends up with a fridge, rear seat camera and every other once-interesting feature they’ll go back and actually work out how to get the cars to handle properly.
Not to say they drive terribly, but in general they’re off-the-pace compared to the competition. I’m hoping that by the time our soon-to-be current lease on our little Chinese EV expires, cars like the BYD Seal will be as fun to drive as they look.
I don’t see how not-long-ago luxury features are gimmicks. You still see people raving about the cr-v table or coolers in older japanese cars, I don’t think most of those features in chinese cars are that different. They do indeed offer more bang for your buck than western brands comfort wise, specially if you live in a developing country where you still get treated like a second class human by some manufacturers
I was a bit unclear. I don’t see the not-so-long ago luxury features as gimmicks (well, not all of them), it’s all the new stuff they’re doing now that they’ve levelled the playing field with the luxury features. Stuff like crab walking and self-opening/closing doors that will almost definitely break at some point down the line.
I’m actually curious to see how all these features hold up after a few years – gimmick or not. Imagine trying to get a wheel alignment done on these new barges with 4-wheel steering in a few years when the suspension has loosened up a bit.
I do agree they do need to improve handling tho, it seems to be the most common compliant in most reviews of Chinese cars
In an EV/semi-autonomous era, handling ranks the lowest in the list of priorities.
The Cooper SE is manufactured in China. They handle great. Although you might not consider this a Chinese car.
Yeah I’m more talking about the Chinese brands as opposed to the ones engineered somewhere else. Initial impressions of the incoming Mazda 6e, which is based on a Chinese platform, have been pretty positive because apparently Mazda’s engineers have been fettling with the suspension. It shows that the many of the Chinese platforms can do better with the right level of localised tuning.
I have mixed feelings about the Mazda 6e.
I guess the people who made Teslas their whole personality have found something similar to move on to?
They can only do this if it’s explained to them in an earnings call by a CEO who is so hopped up on god know’s what he will keep promising things that never come out and his followers will continue to lead to gross overvaluations.
Am I the only one who thinks Elon Musk doesn’t even seem smart whatsoever? It’s all branding. The dude is a dumb dork. He’s conniving more than he is cunning.
Agreed 100%. He’s just somewhat above average intelligence at best. Right place/right time, plus money to start with, plus a gift for exploitation and shameless hype. To be sure, he’s smarter than Mr. Ballroom, but that’s setting the bar pretty low.
Lots of people think that.
Many people who have actually worked with him disagree, but no, it’s not uncommon at all for people to claim he’s not actually smart, nowadays.
He obviously overpromises on timelines, has plenty of other character flaws, etc., but smart people who have worked with him say he’s actually pretty smart based on his ability to talk intelligently with them about the topics they’re experts on.
vive le knockoff 😛
No really tho, too bad Citroen stopped using it themselves. Then of course, they became part of Stellantis 🙁
Oh wait, Stellantis itself is like driving on 3 wheels LOL
Another Chinese car company is using a version of that Bose suspension from the 90s
Stellantis EU is not Stellantis North America.
I appreciate the Autopian for this stuff because it’s often hard to separate fact from fiction when it comes to Chinese cars. Some of what’s reported is very cool but with less independent testing from western outlets, it’s been harder to assess.
However, picking on a single influencer for a random hype statement is easy and not all that informative.
Meanwhile, there has been zero coverage on this site of BYD’s Blade 2.0 Flash charging battery. It’s real, it’s been independently tested, and it’ll do 10-97% in under 9 minutes. That’s much closer to “game over” than this tire gimmick.
I just had to look that up. That charging curve is absolutely incredible if it doesn’t wreck the cell. The kind of curve I expect to see drone hobbyists using in a fireproof pouch.
Yes, I’ve been seeing vids about this in my YT feed. I would be good if someone at Autopian gave this a look-see. 🙂
Jason,
Moving forward, every story that concerns a dubious or erroneous claim MUST include a picture of Tim Robinson asking, “You sure about that?” Especially the second round of questioning where he makes a DeNiro-like face! LOL…
Not only was CHIPs cheap the reuse just about all their crash film. Pay attention and you will see most of the big crashes were the same clips of the same cars. And they didn’t even begin to look like late model unmolested they looked like your average demolition derby car.
I’d expect nothing better of an influencer. Anything that happened before their most recent drug-induced memory loss event does not exist and no thought is too shallow, no effort too little.
I’m genuinely curious – has anyone here actually heard of this Yaw guy before?
It seems like this guy is just an excuse to write about Citroens. Jason – maybe next time just write about the Citroen DS without forcing us to read the bad opinions of some random uninformed jabroney with a few social media followers?
Li YAW… Airplanes control flight via YAW adjustments… Airplanes fly in the SKY… Jason TorchinSKY…
The trail leads directly back to Torch, as you predicted. Good work, detective.
If I could post a gif I would post the Tim and Eric mind explosion gif.
I always thought it was Jaboney. Learn something new every day and you can use it to annoy friends and family.
I have also heard “Jaboney” although I see it more commonly spelled with the R, and usually ending with an -i instead of an -ey. Per The Internet, “jaboney” is an older form of the word and “jabroni” is the form most commonly used today, although “jabroney” is also an accepted spelling.
No matter the spelling, though, this Yaw fella qualifies as a random jabroney/jaboney/jabroni. I think that applies to probably 98% of people who have declared themselves to be influencers.
A pedant after my own heart! 🙂 Thanks Cousin! 🙂
that tweet has 3.6 million views, so that reach was part of the decision. But I hear you.
I am surprised to see the tweet had that many views – he appears to have less than 40k followers. I presume his tweet got attention because someone in the Chinese auto industry promoted it for their benefit. I’m also highly skeptical anywhere near 3.6 million live humans consciously viewed this tweet.
It just felt like this was punching down. It is extremely easy to make fun of self-described influencers (frankly they bring it on themselves) but it seems like a cheap shot respond to a random dude’s tweet like he is a legitimate public figure.
I feel it should have been a deeper look into the huge hype the whole Chinese car industry’s got going and not just a single guy lol. Plus we didn’t even get any insight on the cars doodad suspension
It would be interesting to look into why there are so many “influencers” hyping Chinese cars at all. This Yaw guy might be a good example – he appears to have few followers and mostly posts random stuff unrelated to cars. It seems like a stretch to even call him an influencer. It is not even clear he considers himself an influencer. Yet his one post got millions of views and added thousands of followers.
China’s auto industry appears to be very good at artificially generating hype, or at least appearing to generate hype. The hype is just another advertising campaign, yet people (and publicans like The Autopian) seem to be falling for it.
There is TONS of pro-China influencer ‘reviews’ (content) on Youtube, 98% of which is merely paid advertising by the Chinese government. As you’d expect, there are even videos about these videos and the motivations of their ‘makers.’
With that said, there’s also some regular anti-China content, at least a portion of which someone’s paying the content creator to make (or so I assume).
I’m sure someone at li auto wondered why no one had a modern equivalent of that storied suspension. But was actually allowed to develop one. That would have been the better argument. But not sure someone that says “bro it’s over for” or “cooked” has the intellectual capacity to make that argument or claim.
And now I have the CHIPs theme song in my head…
I had it for about five seconds and defensively ran the Rockford theme through my head to flush it.
I get them both out with the clean 80s synth of Stingray.
I used the A Team theme Mr T ain’t putting up with none of that foolishness.
I pity the fool
A vastly underappreciated facet of 80s pop culture has to be Mike Post and Pete Carpenter.
Too bad they aren’t still making cars like this! Has The Bishop ever taken a crack at making a modern French car Americans would buy? Aka a DS crossover? I feel like the for could be made to work…
Also, why does the Li car have hub caps over the alloy wheels?
Aerodynamics. Though there should be options with much more open spokes available.
Western companies are perfectly capable of innovating, they’d just rather do anything else. Mostly just various forms of reward-hacking. Probably why all their output is the same now.
I am pretty sure stealing 70 year old technology isn’t counting as innovation
I doubt the Chinese company stole it. I would’ve assumed it was more like convergent evolution.
Hell, I’d still give them some credit for “stealing” an idea nobody else was bothering with. Can they steal the idea of phones with headphone jacks?
You mean air suspension?? Pretty sure a few dozen manufacturers have “stolen” that technology already
Oh, he’ll rue the day!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFuwQLeiwMM
Extreme kudos on the Real Genius reference (a fave of mine when I was but a child) and on having the wisdom to choose a clip less than a minute in length Y2Keith. 🙂
I has such a tv crush on Michelle Meyrink. 😉
You know when fluoridation first began? Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.
I’ve Cracked It! POE ! Send The Recall code!
What do you mean recall it? You mean, like a defective Pinto?
like an old man trying to return soup at a deli.
I beeped! I beeped! What did I win? A Pinto?
The thread is a reference to Dr. Strangelove. From that movie, “POE” == “Purity Of Essence”
Another peerless classic! 🙂
YeeeeeHaawww!
Those Commies almost wiped out polio and the measles but thankfully us Freedumbs fought back just in time.
A few freedom loving water districts in utah have stopped adding fluoride. They didn’t mention it’s naturally occuring in their water. Look at the people of utahs and most of Colorados teeth circa 1940 or now and those of Tennessee. Decaying and missing teeth in Tennessee. Mormon smile in utah.
The way it works for red blooded capitalists is to put lead in your water instead.
Jasonia; an island of sanity.
He knows more arcane auto history of cars you’ve never heard of than any other YouTube TwitterXing Yahoo.
Well, he does make up some bizarre coin size of cars stuff, but that’s just what fertile imaginations do.
Jason hallucinated historical events before the YouTube TwitterXing Yahoos made AI hallucinations cool.
It’s a problem with the young who don’t know what they don’t know. Bring us French cars! I wish I had my Renault.
Draw my car like one of your french cars!
Aside from Suzuki (and the much-mourned Saab if we’re including corpses) the car makers I’d most want to see return to America are Citroen, Renault, and Peugot.
Those would not have been my choices had you asked me the question back when I was twentysomething.
With age comes wisdom. And terrible, terrible back and joint pain.
this idiot needs to at least do a quick google search and maybe spend a minute before embarrasing himself
If he’s in China there’s not a lot of Google he’s allowed to use.
If they search “Tiananmen 1989” on Weibo over there, they’d be in jail the next day.
the word influencer isderivative from influenza
it is a disease
I will help spread this.
No it is not. Funny tho
Why are the dumbest and most ignorant always the loudest?
they are loudest because they are dumbest and most ignorant
Can’t argue with that
I’m fine with them being loud. It’s when they start winning elections that I have a problem.
members of the Church of If You Can’t Be Smart, Be Loud
Because they’re usually rewarded for it. At least here they are.
Anyone who starts their missive off with Bro has already lost all credibility with me.
Dude, really?
Okay dumping on the White California surfer potheads is okay
That’s a very 80s thing. Those guys grew up and have families. Most quit, some still smoke.
Ooh so racist you know are African American Brothers use bro all the time.
Bro that’s kinda harsh.
About the topshot: there is very little in this world more obnoxious than 98% of Tim Robinson characters, but it’s oh-so-satisfying in this context to outdo the OP. Aaahhh.
I’ll use this opportunity to advocate for more sedate topshots. Exagerated faciial expressions arn’t needed for every story.
Sensing a real anti-Chinese EV theme between this and TMD today. Are they overblown? Probably. Do I want to be the one to make the choice of what vehicles that conform to local laws I can buy? Absolutely.
Let the Chinese have the low-end electric market and Detroit can keep spitting out land barges protected by the chicken tax. Poor people can finally get a win.
Poor people who bought Yugos and early Hyundai/KIA products were not winning in any way. You get what you pay for.
Perhaps Torch can research an article comparing the reliability of Yugo’s vs cheap, modern Chinese EV’s.
It’s chicken and egg – until they sell them here we will have no idea how they do in American conditions. And frankly, I see no need to cede still more of our balance of trade to the Chinese by letting them sell them here. If we must – do what they did to the rest of the world, make then do joint-ventures with American carmakers and build the damned things here in the US (with full sharing of IP). Fair is fair.
My iPhone works great.
The Chinese didn’t design your iPhone, nor are they in charge of quality control of it – Apple, a VERY American company, does both of those things.
The Chinese will build to any standard you are willing to pay for, but in my direct experience, left to their own devices will cut any corner to save a yuan. I don’t trust them on their own as far as I can throw them.
And as I said, given how they came to BE a car producing country, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Make them here, with US partners, if they want into this market, just like foreign companies had to do there. You can’t simultaneously whine about there being not enough good paying jobs while exporting them all overseas, even if that does make consumer goods cheaper.
I don’t necessarily disagree about controls on technology transfers and so forth, but there’s no inherent reason why American and European workers deserve relative affluence more than Asian and Africans; and let’s not forget that Samuel Slater kicked off the American Industrial Revolution by memorizing the designs of English mill machinery that were illegal to export and using them here to spin cotton grown by the enslaved workers of the South. So, you know, kinda like China after all.
Except Eli Whitney, an American, created the cotton gin which revolutionized the process
They can become affluent building for their OWN markets, which are rather larger than ours.
I’m pretty sure no one actually asked for cancerous formaldehyde in drywall, poison in baby formula and toothpaste, and tin mechanical parts. They steal and sell crap and I’m sure their EVs match this quality.
Well actually the cancerous formaldehyde is mandated by US building code, but mostly in the urea glue particleboard, MDF, and hardwood plywood, mostly from Canada. Apples and pears have a lot of formaldehyde, and humans produce it as part of their metabolism.
That said don’t stick your fingers in it, it makes them numb and it’s used as embalming fluid.
Tin is too expensive for mechanical parts, you are probably thinking of Zamak, a family of zinc alloys—primarily composed of zinc, aluminum, magnesium, and copper invented by the New Jersey Zink company in 1929.
And his iphone is not the best phone either by a country mile. I don’t want to “glaze” the chinese as the kids say but the truth is they have stepped up their manufacturing A LOT
Like I said, they can build to any standard you or they want to pay for. But they also LOVE to cut corners whenever possible if they think they can get away with it.
Almost certainly the best phone hardware (I suffer with one as well) – the software sucks, as does the walled garden ethos of Apple.
Brilliant
I’m by no means an engineer, but C&D’s recent review of the BYD Dolphin mentions all the electronics (including drive motor) as a single assembly, and that’s just setting off all kinds of warning bells of a single 5 cent component turning into a $10k repair.
Not to paint all Chinese cars with the same brush, although with the Dolphin being one of their main contenders for people’s car, I’d want to know I’m being paranoid.
If they’re good enough for Toyota Nissan and VW to rebadge they’re good enough for most people
no anti-Chinese EV sentiment here! They are doing a lot of interesting work and I think they have a place. I’m anti stupid hyperbole and not knowing car history.
In fact Jason Torchinsky was probably the first American Journo to buy and own and review positively a Chinese EV
Just being anti stupid is enough to keep me here.
Yep. I think Jason would do the same post if some other car from some other country – or even France – were able to do the tire change trick, and some idiot influencer ignored the DS and declared this brand new and a manufacturer-killer, he’d do the same post.
Seems anti-influencer, if anything
To be clear, we do love ourselves some cool Chinese vehicles! Remember, Jason adores his Changli, and I’ve owned something like four or five Chinese motorcycles over the years!
For us, the influencers are so nauseating. The same person who posted the Tweet we embedded followed it up by saying that Chinese cars are built better because they’re heavy and stiff, among other things. But that doesn’t make sense the moment you spend more than a few seconds thinking about it. If pure weight is a signifier for quality, then the GMC Hummer EV must be the best EV ever built.
This is a particularly dubious achievement since it’s not going to have a spare in it for you to change anyway.
Scrolled to find a comment on this. What modern car besides trucks and big SUV’s even have a spare any more? Most cars do not even come with a donut any more just BS run flat/repair kits like oh yeah thank you that will fix my tire that had a blow out due to a giant pot hole. To me this is just more expensive BS to break on vehicles is it cool? Sure but I would not want it kind of like 4 wheel steering.
Both “new” vehicles I have 2018 TourX and 2022 Polestar 2 only have those said reinflate/repair kits.
My 2023 Mazda 3 has a spare.
Mazda is appealingly old-school in some respects. Part of why I like them so much. 🙂
Funnily enough I was checking the cheapest evs in my country and one of them actually comes with a full size spare, a nice surprise in 2026.
The whole “influencer” thing just makes me more convinced that Chinese cars are hot garbage.
Influencer should not be a thing, but we live in the worst timeline.
I suspect the cheaper, lower end cars are hot garbage by our standards and wouldn’t sell well over here. However, the higher end cars look to be pretty decent and are priced accordingly.
Five years ago maybe. The quality is coming on in leaps and bounds and in the UK at least there’s no stigma in purchasing them now – you see them everywhere.
Leapmotors and bounds, in fact. 😉
But historically UK standards of automotive quality haven’t been all that picky.
What are you saying? Jaguar, Land Rover or Mini are the pinnacle of automotive reliability.
I think they resulted in the towing industry reliability
Touche! 😀
Well they are used to British built cars so that’s a low bar.
Influencers reflect poorly on whatever they promote. If you have something you want hyped without potential for serious criticism, you show it to an influencer.
Exactly.
Agree, as far as influencers exist therefor this must be the worst timeline.
By that metric current day bmws must be abysmal
They are. BMW has been dead to me for a decade and more.