And America's Truck Brands Are Standing There With Nothing to Say
There's a particular kind of confidence that comes from decades of being the best at something. Ford built its reputation on the F-Series. Jeep made the Wrangler an American institution. Rivian staked a claim on the future of electric adventure. These are companies that know how to make capable trucks and off-road SUVs, and they've been doing it long enough that the idea of a competitor catching up—let alone lapping them—seemed pretty far-fetched.
That confidence might be worth revisiting.
BYD, the Chinese automaker that already shook up the EV world and made serious inroads in hybrid technology across Europe, has now set its sights on the off-road segment. And the machine it showed up with—the Denza B8 Flash Charge Edition—doesn't just compete with what Ford, Jeep, and Rivian are building. It does things those vehicles physically cannot do.
Three Wheels and Still Moving
The centerpiece of the Denza B8's newest update is a suspension system called DiSus-P Ultra, and the capability that's drawing the most attention is straightforward to describe but genuinely hard to believe until you've seen it demonstrated: the truck can lift one wheel completely off the ground and keep driving.
At a media demonstration held at BYD's off-road proving ground, the Denza B8 raised a single wheel—front right, as shown in widely circulated footage—while the remaining three stayed planted and the vehicle continued moving forward. It's not a parlor trick or a staged stunt for a commercial. It's a functional off-road capability built into the suspension hardware.
The system behind it works by independently controlling each corner of the suspension. Unlike conventional setups where all four wheels are linked and respond together, DiSus-P Ultra can raise, lower, stiffen, or stabilize each corner on its own. The lifting force behind this is substantial: BYD states the system produces up to 9 tons of lifting force. The three-wheel driving mode has a speed cap of roughly 9 miles per hour, which is the right call—this isn't meant for highway speeds, it's designed for the moments when you're stuck somewhere serious and need a way out.
The practical applications extend well beyond the dramatic one-wheel demo. The system includes a wheel-lift tire replacement mode, which raises one corner at a time so the wheel hangs in the air without needing a floor jack. For anyone who has ever tried to change a tire on the side of a dirt road in the dark with a factory scissor jack, the appeal of this feature is immediate. There's also a trap recovery mode, which was demonstrated by the vehicle getting intentionally stuck in deep sand and then using suspension adjustments to regain traction and pull itself free. And in the uneven terrain demo, the Denza B8 crawled over a bridge-like structure with irregular surfaces by lifting individual wheels high enough to avoid dragging the chassis against the obstacle.
What the Numbers Actually Say
Raw capability means less without context, so here's some context worth sitting with.
The Denza B8 Flash Charge Edition starts at $61,600 in China. The base version without the Flash Charge update launched at $61,600, with a discounted price bringing it even lower during promotional periods. For that money, buyers get a body-on-frame plug-in hybrid SUV running a 2.0-liter turbocharged engine paired with two electric motors, producing a combined 550 kilowatts—which works out to 738 horsepower. Torque comes in at 760 Newton-meters. The sprint from zero to 60 miles per hour takes 4.8 seconds. In a vehicle that weighs approximately 3.3 tons, that acceleration figure is remarkable, and reviews have confirmed BYD is not lying about it.
Ground clearance with the DiSus-P system raised to its maximum sits at 310 millimeters—just over 12 inches. Wading depth comes in at 890 millimeters, nearly three feet of water the truck can push through without issue. Approach angle is 34 degrees, departure angle is 35 degrees. There are 16 selectable drive modes covering everything from standard road conditions to specific settings for mud, sand, rock, and mountain terrain.
The Denza B8 also received a five-star ANCAP crash test rating earlier this year, which matters for anyone who treats safety ratings as a baseline rather than a bonus.
For comparison, the average new vehicle price in the United States sits right around $50,000 right now—and that buys a mainstream truck or mid-size SUV with a conventional suspension that does not lift individual wheels. The American market equivalent of the technology packed into the Denza B8, if any American automaker were to offer it, would almost certainly push into six-figure pricing territory. That gap between what China is delivering and what American automakers are charging is worth paying attention to.
A Technology Race America Isn't Winning
What makes the Denza B8's suspension especially significant is that it's not standing alone. BYD's other brands have their own active suspension systems, each with a different engineering approach. The Yangwang U7, another BYD product, uses an electromagnetic system called DiSus-Z that controls suspension movement directly without hydraulic fluid. Li Auto's new L9 uses an 800-volt fully active hydraulic setup that can independently control all four wheels, supports single-wheel lifting, and does away with a traditional anti-roll bar entirely. Li Auto states the system responds within milliseconds. Aito, the brand backed by Huawei, runs a similar fully active hydraulic suspension with comparable capabilities.
These companies are not sharing a single technology—they are competing with each other on this exact ground, which means the development pace isn't slowing down. The next generation of whatever comes after DiSus-P Ultra is already being worked on somewhere. Meanwhile, the suspension technology available in American-built off-road vehicles does not currently support independent wheel lifting of any kind.
This is the pattern that has played out in other segments before. When Chinese automakers moved into the EV market, the speed and scale of what they built caught the rest of the world off guard. When they turned to hybrids, the same thing happened in Europe. The off-road market is the next frontier, and the Denza B8 is the opening statement.
What It's Actually Like to Drive
Capability on a spec sheet and capability on real terrain are different things, and the Denza B8 has received real-world reviews that are worth accounting for.
On the road, reviewers have noted that the B8's weight—that 3.3-ton curb weight—makes itself known. The steering has been described as vague, and body roll through corners is noticeable enough to draw comment. The suspension, for all its technological sophistication, has been found to behave inconsistently at times: confident through some bends, abrupt in others, and occasionally unresponsive on rough pavement when it should be adjusting damping. One reviewer described the on-road experience as feeling like a "land boat." That's not a compliment, but it's an honest one.
Take the B8 off the pavement, however, and the story changes. Off-road reviews have consistently found the truck to be effective and capable once it's actually doing the job it was designed for. The suspension's ability to raise itself to 310 millimeters of ground clearance is genuinely impressive in person—one review described towering over another B8 that had its suspension in a lower setting—and the 16 terrain modes give drivers real options for different conditions rather than a single off-road setting that's supposed to handle everything.
BYD and Denza have indicated that many of the on-road calibration issues can be addressed through over-the-air software updates, which is the modern answer to this kind of problem. Whether that assurance holds up or not depends on follow-through, but the hardware itself is not in question.
The Denza B8 also partners with Huawei for driver assistance. The Flash Charge Edition comes standard with Huawei's ADS 4 system, backed by dual lidar sensors, three millimeter-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and 11 cameras. It's worth noting that the Denza B8 is the first BYD product to incorporate Huawei's driving assistance technology, following a formal joint development agreement the two companies signed in late 2024 specifically aimed at building the first smart-driving system designed for off-road vehicles.
The American Off-Road Blind Spot
The Rivian R2 has been positioned as a capable adventure vehicle for people who want something different from the traditional Jeep-and-Ford crowd. It looks the part and has found an audience. But the technology gap between what Rivian offers and what the Denza B8 can actually do in serious off-road conditions is substantial. The same applies to Ford and Jeep—neither company has anything in development, at least publicly, that would match three-wheel driving, independent wheel-lift suspension, or the raw combination of capability and price that BYD has put on the table.
Part of the problem is structural. American automakers are dealing with the constraints of existing platforms, existing price points, and existing customer expectations. Adding the kind of active suspension system that the DiSus-P Ultra represents would require engineering investment that would show up in the sticker price. At a moment when American households are already stretching to afford vehicles averaging $50,000, there's a real question about who the market for a six-figure tech-heavy off-roader actually is.
Chinese automakers are not working under the same constraints, and the results are increasingly hard to ignore.
The Real Question Going Forward
The Denza B8 is not available in the United States. Current trade policy, including tariffs on Chinese-made vehicles, means that American consumers cannot simply walk into a dealership and buy one. That insulation from direct competition is real—for now.
But the technology exists. It has been demonstrated publicly. It works. And the price at which it is being sold in China is a benchmark that every American automaker knows about.
What the Denza B8 represents is less about a single truck and more about a direction. Chinese automakers are no longer content to compete in the budget or mainstream segments. They are coming for the high-capability, high-aspiration vehicles that American brands have long treated as their home turf. Off-roading has been one of the last places where domestic manufacturers felt genuinely comfortable—where heritage and engineering credibility still carried weight.
That comfort is getting harder to justify. When a truck from the other side of the world can lift a wheel on command, pull itself out of deep sand using suspension adjustments alone, crawl over uneven terrain without dragging its frame, and do all of it for under $62,000, the conversation about what American off-road vehicles should be capable of needs to change.
Ford, Jeep, and Rivian have built real things that real people rely on. That's not nothing. But standing still while the technology bar moves this fast is how a segment gets left behind, and the Denza B8 Flash Charge Edition is a very clear signal that the bar has moved.
