There are many ways to launch a new car. You could put it on a stage, you could wheel it into a fancy hotel, employ a mildly enthusiastic presenter and tell journalists about its revolutionary new infotainment system. Or, if you’re Dongfeng, you could point your new electric SUV at a tunnel, wind it up to 130km/h and drive the bloody thing around the walls, across the roof and back onto the road.
Meet the Voyah Passion S, the latest electric offering from Dongfeng’s premium Voyah brand, and quite possibly the first new car to arrive with the unofficial marketing message: “Gravity? Yeah, we’re not really bothered.”
The Passion S has just completed a full 360-degree loop inside a specially constructed tunnel in Wuhan, China, travelling at around 130km/h. And yes, that means there was a moment when this five-metre-plus electric SUV was completely upside down, with nothing underneath it except the tunnel ceiling.
Déjà vu, but with batteries
If this all sounds vaguely familiar, you’re not imagining things. Back in 2010, Mercedes-Benz produced one of those wonderfully bonkers advertisements featuring Michael Schumacher and an SLS AMG seemingly performing a 360-degree loop inside a tunnel. It became legendary.
It also became the subject of a rather large internet debate about exactly how much of the stunt was real, how much was clever filming and whether Schumacher was actually doing what we thought he was doing. Fast-forward 16 years and Dongfeng has basically looked at that advert and said “Hold our battery.”
The difference this time is that Voyah claims its Passion S was a production vehicle, using its standard battery and factory hardware, without weight reduction or special modifications. The stunt was performed at a closed facility in Wuhan, with the car entering the loop at approximately 130km/h and an initial steering angle of around 16 degrees. And unlike the Mercedes, this isn’t some low-slung supercar, it’s an electric SUV, a big one. Which makes the whole thing considerably more entertaining.
So, how the heck does it stay on the roof?
Before we assume Voyah has discovered anti-gravity technology, there’s actually some fairly straightforward physics involved. The Passion S isn’t magically glued to the tunnel, it’s relying on speed, the curvature of the tunnel and centrifugal force.
As the car travels around the curved surface, the force pushing it towards the tunnel surface effectively keeps the tyres pressed against it. Keep the speed high enough and the car can transition from floor to wall, wall to roof and roof back to wall without falling away. Slow down too much, however, and things get considerably more exciting for all the wrong reasons.
Voyah says the car needed to maintain roughly 130km/h, with just a 3–5km/h reduction potentially enough to cause it to lose contact with the surface. And here’s the clever bit, mass itself isn’t the enemy.
The fundamental minimum speed required for a given circular path depends on gravity and the radius of the loop (are you still there?), not simply on whether you’ve got a 1.6-tonne sports car or a 2.5-tonne electric SUV. The heavier vehicle does, however, put considerably more load through the tyres, suspension, chassis and tunnel structure.
So while the laws of physics don’t necessarily care how fat your SUV is, the engineers and accountants certainly do.
And this is where an EV has a rather handy advantage
There’s another fascinating aspect to this stunt that doesn’t involve horsepower, it’s what isn’t there. An internal-combustion engine has fluids, pumps, lubrication systems and fuel delivery systems that aren’t particularly keen on being turned upside down.
Turn a conventional car upside down for long enough and the engine’s oil system can become very unhappy indeed. An EV doesn’t have an engine sitting there desperately trying to suck oil from the bottom of a sump while hanging from the roof.
The Passion S’ electric motors don’t care that the car has briefly decided that the ceiling is now the road, that’s one of the genuinely interesting aspects of this stunt. The electric powertrain makes doing something like this mechanically more straightforward than it would be with a conventional engine.
Of course, straightforward is doing some heavy lifting here, you still have to build the car, tyres, suspension and structure to survive it. And then you need a driver brave enough to actually have a go.
Meet the Passion S
Of course, the tunnel stunt is designed to get eyeballs, but there’s an actual vehicle underneath all that theatrical nonsense. The Voyah Passion S is a coupe-style electric SUV measuring more than five metres long, riding on a 3,000mm wheelbase and using an 800-volt electrical architecture. Depending on specification, it is offered with different battery and drivetrain configurations, including a seriously potent dual-motor AWD version.
That range-topping setup produces around 475kW, or 637hp, and 765Nm of torque, enough to propel the big electric SUV from 0–100km/h in approximately 4.5 seconds. That’s quick. But apparently not quite quick enough for Voyah, so they put it on the ceiling.
The Passion S also uses an 800V platform and is claimed to offer up to around 740km of CLTC range, depending on specification. It also features sophisticated driver-assistance hardware, including lidar technology, because apparently the car’s list of party tricks wasn’t already long enough.
The real achievement isn’t just the loop
Let’s be honest, car manufacturers love a stunt. We’ve seen cars jump, climb, drift, race trains, tow ridiculous things and generally behave in ways that your insurance company would strongly discourage. So why is this one worth paying attention to?
Because it’s a pretty neat demonstration of how quickly the performance envelope of EVs is expanding. Instant torque, extremely precise motor control, sophisticated traction management, a low-mounted battery, rigid platforms and powerful all-wheel-drive systems. Put all of that together and you have a vehicle capable of doing things that would have required serious motorsport preparation a couple of decades ago.
Voyah is also making a rather deliberate statement about its ambitions. The company isn’t positioning the Passion S as merely another anonymous Chinese EV, it’s saying: we want to play with the big boys. And if that requires driving upside down to make the point, so be it.
Marketing? Absolutely.
And let’s not pretend this is just some altruistic contribution to automotive engineering. This is marketing, brilliant marketing, admittedly, but marketing nonetheless.
The Passion S is a new model entering an increasingly crowded Chinese EV market, where manufacturers are competing not only on range, charging speed and technology but also on how quickly they can grab your attention. And it’s difficult to think of a better attention-grabber than a giant electric SUV driving on the ceiling.
The fact that the stunt echoes the famous Schumacher/SLS AMG commercial makes it even smarter. Mercedes created an iconic piece of automotive advertising, Voyah has effectively resurrected it, added 16 years of EV technology and replaced the SLS AMG with something considerably larger. It’s the automotive equivalent of saying “Remember this? We can do it too. And ours has a giant battery.”
Would I try it?
Absolutely not. Not unless there was a very substantial cheque involved, a very large insurance policy and somebody else was responsible for explaining the decision to my family. But I would happily watch someone else do it. And that’s precisely why the stunt works.
It’s ridiculous, unnecessary, it’s spectacular and, underneath the silliness, there’s some genuinely impressive engineering going on. The Voyah Passion S has managed to turn one of the oldest tricks in the automotive stunt book into a very modern EV technology demonstration. At 130km/h, it climbs the wall, crosses the roof upside down and completes the full 360 degrees before returning to terra firma, all while carrying a large battery and enough technology to probably complain about the experience afterwards.
Tarmac Takeaway
So, what have we learned? Don’t slow down, Don’t try this at home and perhaps most importantly, if you’re launching a new Chinese EV in 2026, apparently the traditional press release is now officially boring.
