According to NetEase Auto, a closed-course test video released by Dongchedi on Oct. 8 has put the Maextro V800, a premium MPV jointly developed by Huawei and JAC, under scrutiny. Dongchedi said three brand-new cars from different production batches all suffered physical fractures of the brake pedal bracket during repeated full-force emergency braking from 100 km/h (62 mph) to zero. According to the report, the cars were in factory condition with no modifications, and their odometers showed very little mileage; one had driven no more than 3 km (1.9 miles).
The first car broke on its third emergency stop, and the second broke on its fourth. To check whether the failure could be reproduced, the testers bought a third new car, which broke on only the second full-force stop. Video from all three tests showed the fractures centred on the pedal pivot and support bracket, with similar fracture surfaces. Dongchedi said pedal-force sensors recorded peaks above 4,000 N in some braking runs, and that the third car logged about 1,612 N at the moment of failure.
The article notes that passenger-car brake-pedal static strength is often benchmarked against a group or national standard of 2,000 N held for five seconds without failure, but that this test was a dynamic, repeated-impact procedure, so the comparison is not direct. What concerns the public, it argues, is a simpler fact: three new cars from different batches failed at the same point.
Shares and sales timing
JAC's Shanghai-listed shares hit the daily limit-down intraday and closed the midday session down 10.01%, with half-day turnover above 3.5 billion yuan (about $493 million). The Maextro V800 went on sale in August 2026 at a Chinese guide price before taxes and incentives of 766,000 yuan (about $107,900) to 1,016,000 yuan (about $143,100), and deliveries began in September. The incident therefore lands just after deliveries began, during a critical period for building reputation and sales momentum.
NetEase Auto argues that brake-pedal input cannot be treated as a normal laboratory condition. Drivers in an emergency may stamp hard at an awkward angle, and any such input is part of the design envelope for a brake system. A pedal bracket is not a caliper or a hydraulic master cylinder; it is the mechanical pivot that transfers foot force into the braking system. Once it breaks, the foot-brake input is lost.
Dongchedi's testers said a normal 100 km/h stop took about 38 metres, while after the bracket failed the car could only be slowed using P-gear emergency deceleration, stretching the stopping distance to about 140 metres. The Maextro V800 is promoted with redundant braking, steering and power systems, plus Huawei's Tuling Longxing platform, electro-hydraulic braking and the Qiankun ADS 5.0 advanced driver-assistance system. In normal operation, those systems support the driver, but in this failure mode none of them can replace a missing physical input from the driver's foot, the report says.
The Chinese outlet's conclusion is blunt: three cars from different batches breaking at the same location is not a coincidence, and a carmaker cannot dismiss the result as an extreme test or blame the driver's technique. No marketing claim about redundancy changes the fact that a mechanical part failed under repeated heavy use, it says. Emergency braking, it concludes, must cope with whatever a human being instinctively does in the moment.
