Watch: YangWang hypercar jumps in the air and rotates on the spot

The YangWang U9 is remarkably affordable for a 1,287-horsepower electric hypercar at around US$236,000. It also rocks a 'DiSus' active suspension system powerful enough to launch the car off the ground, or let it rotate on the spot in a "tank turn."

Amusingly-named YangWang is the luxury/premium performance subsidiary of China's biggest automaker, BYD. This rising giant is currently the world's 9th-biggest automaker by volume according to Focus2Move, with 1.9 million sales for the year to date as of yesterday, representing a monster 24.33% increase over last year. So it's #9 with a bullet – and indeed according to a new market report from ABI Research, BYD is now the world's #1 electric vehicle manufacturer.

Launched late last year, the YangWang U9 went into production last month. It's a sharp-looking machine with fancy scissor-up doors, but it's got little ambition to challenge the top dogs on acceleration (2.36 seconds from 0-100 km/h, or 0-62 mph) or top speed (a limited 300 km/h, or 186 mph).

YangWang

But big horsepower, acceleration and performance figures are getting to be a bit of a yawn-fest in the burgeoning electric supercar space; there's little romance in an electric powertrain, and little shortage of competition.

Luckily, the YangWang has a couple of tricks up its wheel wells, in the form of a very neat active suspension system, which allows ride height to be adjusted by up to 75 mm (3 inches) at each wheel. And rather rapidly, as it turns out – if the car squats low, then pushes up with its full force at all four wheels together, the suspension generates more than 1 ton of lifting force and literally bounces the car off the ground. Here's a video showing this party trick in action:

It's not jumping high enough to do anything useful; there's no bunny-hop button to hit when you're coming up to a pothole or a small child, and were you to bounce like that on the move, there's little guarantee it'd end up being pretty. It's there more as a demonstration of the suspension system than anything else, but it's still pretty neat.

The functional uses of this active suspension are a little more quotidian – it's designed mainly to counteract acceleration forces and keep the car flat by raising the rear end under acceleration and the front under braking, and counteracting body roll in corners by elevating the outside wheel. That, and the normal suspension gig on maintaining tire contact with the road.

But it's sure fun to watch, both bouncing around like a short-stroke Chinese answer to the freshest of El Caminos on hydraulics, and making like Michael Jackson while rotating on the spot in a "tank turn" like so:

These kinds of tank turns are possible for more or less any electric with the ability to distribute lots of torque precisely between four wheels at different rates – indeed, Rivian's off-road electric 4WDs can use the same technique to spin so fast on loose surfaces that you'd want to have sick bags handy:

So fast, in fact, that Rivian declined to make it an option on its production cars because it'd tear up too much dirt to fit with the company's 'Tread Lightly' messaging, according to Green Car Reports.

From the looks of things, BYD and YangWang might not have the same scruples, as evidenced by this rather surreal video of half a dozen YangWang U8 SUVs spinning in unison – on tarmac, rather than loose soil, too.

It'd certainly be a neat way to get these big machines out of a tight parking spot.

Source: YangWang