On September 14, 2026, at the opening of Dongfeng Motor's 10th Technology Innovation Week, Yi Jing Auto held a technical briefing for its Tianqiong Zhidun (Sky Dome Smart Shield) safety architecture, which the company describes as the industry's first "full-time-space" safety system. Zeng Qinglin, a Yi Jing executive, outlined the brand's safety philosophy and released a series of extreme test results for the first model to carry the architecture, the Yi Jing X9, according to the Chinese outlet Diandongbang.
From fragmented systems to a unified safety framework
Yi Jing's argument is that conventional safety systems are siloed: passive safety handles what happens after a crash, active safety intervenes just before impact, and intelligent safety anticipates potential collisions, while battery and health protections operate independently. Real accidents, the company contends, rarely stem from a single cause or present a single risk. The Tianqiong Zhidun architecture places the entire vehicle's risk profile on a timeline extending from before danger arises to after an accident, and across a spatial axis from far to near, aiming for pre-event prediction, in-event intervention and post-event fallback.
The architecture draws on Huawei's "Tao's Law" approach of breaking performance bottlenecks through spatial reconfiguration, and it integrates Huawei's Qiankun ADS 5 driver assistance as the "prediction shield" plus Dongfeng's vehicle safety capabilities as the "guardian shield." The X9 carries a 896-line dual-optical-path image-grade lidar that can identify obstacles 14 cm tall at 120 metres, and a four-lidar setup with three additional solid-state units covering the sides and rear, boosting lateral detection precision fivefold over conventional ultrasonic sensors and doubling distance accuracy. The vehicle has 32 fusion perception sensors, with cloud-vehicle coordination enabling warnings of hazards 5 kilometres away, alerts at 2 kilometres, and fine-grained recognition and avoidance within 162 metres.
In a live test broadcast on China Central Television, the X9's Huawei Qiankun ADS 5 detected a small toy dog under oncoming headlights at night and planned a smooth detour. In heavy rain with low visibility, distributed millimetre-wave radar penetrated the rain to identify and avoid three obstacles in sequence: a dummy, a fallen barrier and a disabled vehicle behind a water curtain.
Body strength and battery safety under extreme stress
Beyond active safety, the X9's body is built on a 6-longitudinal, 11-lateral cage structure. Yi Jing says it completed a frontal offset collision test it calls the world's highest level, using a mobile barrier weighing nearly 2.48 tonnes at 105 km/h, with impact energy about 36 percent higher than a same-weight baseline. The result: the occupant compartment remained intact, the A-pillar showed no obvious deformation, all four doors opened normally, and the battery had zero leakage and no fire.
The body uses high-strength steel and aluminium accounting for 92.4 percent of its mass. The A-pillar embeds a 2300 MPa hot-gas-inflated tube beam, the side structure uses 2300 MPa hot-formed dual door rings and door beams, and the B-pillar adds 2400 MPa ultra-high-strength steel, exceeding the industry mainstream of 1500-2000 MPa. In a roof crush test, a 16-tonne container pressed vertically on the roof, and the A-pillar, B-pillar and door rings held with the compartment intact and doors still operable. The team says it also ran sequential tests with three different weights, with 20 tonnes being the crane's lifting limit rather than the vehicle's safety ceiling.
For battery protection, the X9 builds on CATL cells with four defensive layers: a front crossbeam to intercept frontal impacts, aluminium sill beams on the sides to absorb energy, a three-layer bottom shield of polyurea coating, steel plate and polyurea coating with impact resistance three times the national standard, and aerogel insulation between cells to stop thermal runaway propagation. In validation, a battery that had already been through a crash test was subjected to further extreme tests, including direct flame exposure for 180 seconds, about 2.6 times the new national standard requirement.
After a collision, the vehicle retains both mechanical door-opening paths and electrical residual unlocking, and a supercapacitor at the vehicle's centre can power the central lock and child lock even if the main power fails. An E-Call system reports position and accident information. If the driver becomes incapacitated while driving, the system wakes them with sound, light and haptic alerts within 20 seconds; if unresponsive, it automatically slows, signals, changes lanes to the right and stops in the emergency lane, then unlocks doors, projects an SOS onto the ground, flashes hazard lights and honks continuously while notifying rescue services.
Yi Jing also includes health in its safety scope: all touchable surfaces are soft-wrapped and skin-friendly with antibacterial materials certified to OEKO-TEX Class 1, and a negative-ion fresh air system with strong adsorbent materials aims to keep cabin air clean. The brand's stated principle is that "meeting standards is just an entry ticket; never treat a certificate as a trophy," reflecting a shift from compliance-focused benchmarking to full-domain redundancy in Chinese EV safety design.
