The Denza Z9 GT Can Drift by Itself, and Someone Just Proved It at GoodwoodAt the Goodwood Festival of Speed this July, Supercar Blondie presenter Chloe climbed into a 1,139-hp electric shooting brake, drew a circle on the touchscreen, and then kept her hands in her lap while the car executed a sustained, controlled drift around that exact path. No steering input. No throttle. No drama – well, except for Chloe's reaction:"I'm ready. Are you ready? Whoa! Guys, this car can drift by itself. Do you see that? Now, this isn't a function that's available to most people because you can't do this in your supermarket car park, okay? It's illegal. But it's bloody cool anyway, right?"The car is the Denza Z9 GT, a five-door shooting brake from BYD's premium sub-brand that arrived in China last year. The autonomous drift capability started reaching Chinese owners through an OTA update in June 2026, timed more or less exactly to Denza's international push. The mechanics behind it are really impressive: the Z9 GT runs fully independent rear-wheel control through its dual rear motors, paired with active rear steering capable of up to 20 degrees of angle.AdvertisementAdvertisementDraw your shape on the 17.3-inch central display, and the onboard system manages torque distribution and steering inputs to trace that outline in a continuous drift while you sit there doing nothing. It can handle a circle or a figure-8, though it draws the line – literally – at obstacle avoidance. If something rolls into the drift path, the car has no way to adapt.The Party Trick Is Actually a Safety SystemThe self-drift feature is attention-grabbing enough that it's easy to miss what it demonstrates about the underlying hardware. The same independent rear-wheel torque vectoring and rear-wheel steering that lets the Z9 GT trace a drawn circle is what gives the car the reaction speed to catch a high-speed skid before a driver can perceive one has started. At 2.9 tonnes, the Z9 GT is not a car that forgives physics – the software is doing a lot of work to make it feel manageable at all.The powertrain behind all of this consists of a 308 hp front motor and two 416 hp rear motors fed by a 122.49 kWh battery, for a combined output of 1,139 hp and 892 lb-ft of torque. The driver-assistance architecture runs BYD's BAS3.0+ platform across 33 sensors including two LiDAR units, covering everything from highway navigation to autonomous valet parking – all included at no additional cost for the life of the vehicle.The Goodwood demonstration added one more item to that list: standing outside an empty car, pulling up a phone app, and watching it reverse itself into a tight space between a concrete pillar and another vehicle. "Now watch this. There's nobody in the car. But do you guys want to see a cool trick? Got an app on the phone, I'm gonna press this button…" Chloe said, before the Z9 GT did exactly that.AdvertisementAdvertisementWhether any of this makes it to UK and European buyers in its full form is genuinely unclear. The autonomous drift feature is likely to stay locked to the Chinese market given how tightly regulated similar autonomous functions are in Western markets. Denza is banking on legislation catching up – the LiDAR hardware is already on the roof, and future capability is a software update away according to What Car?. BYD officially launched Denza in the UK at Goodwood, with the Z9 GT arriving ahead of the Z supercar, which is expected before the end of 2026. UK buyers will get the hardware. The self-drift function is another matter.
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