MKBHD: "Are we cooked? Not yet"

The video opens with "there are a lot of hot takes" — Marques acknowledging the meme rather than just repeating it. The "have you seen these Chinese cars" framing dominates US tech-press coverage, and he wants to test the claim with a real car instead of a tweet.

The car under review is the standard SU7 (not the Ultra). Industrial-design walkthrough comes first: the screen, the soft-close doors, the panel gaps, the materials. At ~$42,000 equivalent in China, Marques keeps coming back to one number — how much hardware this is for the money, and how few US options sit anywhere near it.

The drive section is shorter than the unboxing. The car is fast for what it is, the regen is well-tuned, the software is responsive. None of this is groundbreaking on its own — what's striking is the consistency. Few cars at this price feel this finished.

Then the pivot: software ecosystem. Native Xiaomi-phone integration, voice assistant in Chinese, OTA cadence, the way HyperOS hands notifications between phone and car. This is the part Marques flags as actually novel — not the EV hardware, but the consumer-electronics treatment of the vehicle itself.

The conclusion arrives at 13:44. "You could say there's a little something to it" — partial concession to the doom narrative. Then the actual answer: "Not yet." The reasoning: the car will not be sold in the US, the software ecosystem doesn't translate cleanly, and the tariff math means this specific car at this specific price is a thought experiment, not a competitive threat in the next 24 months.

He closes on calibration rather than verdict. The doom take is real on a 5–10 year horizon if regulation and trade conditions shift; the dismissal take understates how complete the package already is. Today, neither extreme survives contact with the actual car.