Huawei-JAC Zunjie V800 brake failures forced free upgrades and tighter rules

On October 8, 2026, the Chinese automotive platform Dongchedi published test footage showing three units of the Maestro V800 — the luxury MPV sold in China as Zunjie, co-developed by Huawei and JAC Motors and priced up to 1.01 million yuan — all breaking their brake pedal brackets during emergency braking. The model had launched in August. Huawei pushed back, saying the test conditions were excessive and no customer vehicle had shown the problem, but still committed to revising the design and providing free upgrades for delivered vehicles.

The fallout went beyond one model. On October 10, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other agencies issued guidelines tightening vehicle development, testing and verification procedures. People's Daily followed on October 11 with a commentary attacking 'rush-built' vehicles — models whose development schedules are cut aggressively to grab early market share — and the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers urged the industry to stop treating safety as secondary to new launches.

The episode landed in the middle of a ruinous domestic price war that has pushed Chinese automakers to compress development timelines. Analysts told Seoul Economic Daily the case could push Beijing to make currently advisory safety standards for new-energy vehicles mandatory or draft separate braking rules, and that Huawei may have to adjust how front-and-center its brand sits in carmaking partnerships.

Free brake upgrades for every delivered V800 and a design revision, plus new MIIT guidelines tightening development and testing industry-wide.

A brake pedal bracket is a part that should never fail in an emergency stop, and the test showed three of three units breaking.

The V800 was developed and launched on the compressed schedules now common in China's EV price war, the practice regulators explicitly targeted in response.

The failure was public: the footage came from an independent automotive platform, not a regulator, so the narrative ran ahead of any official test.

The model is a flagship — a 1.01-million-yuan luxury MPV carrying Huawei's brand — so a structural brake part failing was magnified by the brand promise attached to it.

Compressing development schedules to win a price war shifts the cost of unfinished engineering onto customers and, eventually, onto the whole industry's rulebook.

Huawei said it would revise the relevant design and upgrade delivered vehicles free of charge while insisting customer cars had not shown the failure. MIIT and other agencies issued guidelines on October 10 tightening how vehicles are developed, tested and verified, and observers expect further tightening, possibly converting advisory safety standards for new-energy vehicles into mandatory ones. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers called on the industry to stop relegating safety behind launches.