BYD Put the Front Wheels on the Back. Then It Restarted Everybody’s Warranty.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2026

Let’s rewind the tape, because the most revealing car story of the year is not about a battery, a chip, or a charging record. It is about which end of the car the wheels went on. BYD, the world’s biggest maker of electric cars, spent Wednesday apologising to owners of the Great Tang, its flagship SUV, after some of those SUVs left the factory with the front wheel rims fitted at the back and the wider rear wheel rims fitted at the front. The factory did not catch it. The quality line did not catch it. The customers caught it, looked down at their own cars, and took the discovery to Chinese social media, which is where the world’s biggest EV maker had to go to learn what its own production line had done. Every Previously On… segment grades a decision. This one grades an assembly line that never looked at the car.

A flagship sold on precision

Understand what the Great Tang is supposed to be, because the comedy only lands at full price. The Great Tang, called the Da Tang in China, is the first flagship D-segment SUV in BYD’s Dynasty line: the largest, most luxurious vehicle in the range, a seven-seat family flagship arranged two, two and three. It went on sale on June 17, priced from 239,900 yuan to 309,900 yuan, carrying BYD’s second-generation Blade Battery and flash-charging technology that the company markets as refuelling at electric speed. The market believed the pitch. Electrek reports that preorders passed 150,000 by launch day, a record for a single BYD model, and CnEVPost’s reporting puts the scoreboard since then at 14,000 sold in October alone and 54,222 from the June 17 launch through October 31, citing a poster from Lu Tian, the general manager of BYD’s Dynasty sales division. Electrek separately describes the car as the top-selling pure-electric large SUV for two straight months. This is not a compliance special or a fleet discount runner. It is the car BYD points at when it wants the world to take its engineering seriously, built in the tens of thousands, sold on precision. Keep the word precision in mind. It is about to do a lot of work.

The owners looked down

Here is the defect, stated the way the owners stated it, because their account is the one CnEVPost carried and the one BYD’s own statement answered. The Great Tang runs a staggered setup: the two ends of the car are deliberately not the same. On the version with 20-inch rims, the owners say, the factory specification calls for narrower 8J×20 rims with 255/50R20 tyres at the front and wider 9J×20 rims with 275/45R20 tyres at the rear. Wider rubber at the back is a deliberate engineering choice, the kind of detail a flagship charges money for. On some cars, the two sets were reversed: the narrow front set mounted at the rear, the wide rear set mounted at the front, and the cars were finished, shipped and delivered that way. Nobody on the line flagged it. The people who flagged it were the owners, comparing what was on their cars against what was supposed to be on their cars, and their complaints drew widespread attention on Chinese social media before BYD said a word. The most basic inspection in carmaking — walk around the vehicle and look at it — was performed, in the end, by the buying public.

The apology, in BYD’s own hand

On Wednesday, BYD answered in writing, in a statement posted to its official Weibo account and dated November 11. The sentence that matters most is the plain one: “We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this incident has caused owners.” The company said its investigation had traced the mix-up to a code-entry error by its wheel-rim subassembly supplier — a wrong code entered upstream, after which the line faithfully built the wrong thing, car after car. BYD said it moved immediately: inspections begun, the codes corrected so later batches would not repeat the error, and the supplier has added a visual error-prevention system to the production line, a safeguard whose name tells the whole story of what was missing. Somebody, at last, will be looking at the wheels. The company also pledged a comprehensive review and continued corrective work with its supplier. Notice what the statement does not contain, because the Rewind notices omissions the way it notices acts: at no point does it say how many SUVs left the factory wearing their wheels backwards. Hold that thought through the next section, because the remedy is real and the count is still missing.

A real fix, and one missing number

The fix, to be fair to it, is not a shrug. Affected owners are being invited to local service centres for a free inspection and a professional rim swap. BYD will provide a loaner vehicle or reimburse transportation expenses while the car is sorted. And the headline remedy: the full-vehicle warranty on every affected car restarts, effective immediately — the clock goes back to zero from November 11, as if the car had been delivered correctly the first time. BYD also says its dedicated testing found the reversed rims had no effect on the affected cars’ handling and posed no driving safety risk. That is the company’s own testing claim, and it is carried here exactly as that: BYD’s word, from BYD’s tests, in BYD’s statement. What no report carries, because BYD has not released it, is the size of the mistake. CnEVPost states it flatly: the statement did not disclose the number of vehicles or production batches involved. Electrek, the Dow Jones wire carried by Morningstar, and Carscoops all record the same silence. Carscoops frames the moment plainly: the admission lands while BYD is pushing into new markets and expanding aggressively overseas, under increased scrutiny — the worst possible week to be caught fitting a flagship together backwards. A restarted warranty is a genuine answer to the owners who found the problem. It is not an answer to the only question left standing, which is how many owners have not found it yet.

THE VERDICT — After review: the donkey is a production line that trusted a code more than its own eyes. A flagship sold on precision shipped with its wheels swapped end to end, and the inspection that caught it was run by the customers, free of charge, on social media. Give the apology its due: a free swap, a loaner car, and a warranty clock restarted for every affected owner is how a company is supposed to answer, and BYD answered in a day. But a warranty can be restarted. The sentence cannot: the world’s biggest EV maker put the front wheels on the back. It now sits in the record beside the 54,222 sales BYD was happy to publish — and the one number it still owes everybody is how many.