I find it funny this clearly low budget brand cares about saving few dollars on physical controls. Prospective buyers should treat it same way, after all you can buy much cheaper family car Xiaomi EV which performs better than this so called sports car Ferrari.
TIL majority of people (ITT) call touchpad a trackpad
I thought you use it to distinguish between external trackpad vs laptop touchpad, but seems many people still use it even for laptop touchpad, so can someone enlighten me what's the distinction in usage?
Counterpoint - I returned to China (Beijing) last summer after 9 years and was honestly surprised how LITTLE it has changed over those 9 years, I was expecting big changes reading this tales about Shenzhen, but the reality is maybe only 1/4-1/3 of the cars on the road were EVs, there were pretty much none escooters, people still smoke in restaurants and yes, the air was for the most part perfectly fine, though this was really case in summer even before.
The most noticable change which puzzled me where those big boxes with slots in all restaurants and grocery shops, which are rental powerbanks.
Other than these hardly anything changed, policemen in police station smoked right under no smoking sign and in that half an hour in their office I inhaled more secondary smoke than in years in Europe combined. To their credit they were as laid back as policemen in my small home town. Beijing province border checks are more strict, but they still let us go without registered accommodation on weekend.
Oh yeah, out of dozens restaurants we frequented ONE fancy hot pot restaurant had robot bringing over plates.
Plus Taobao/Tmall seems replaced now with Pinduoduo with super cheap purchases (think double the Alibaba/factory price) including free shipping.
Mutianyu great wall is now fully mainstream, everyone (99%) now use cable car instead of hiking uphill, before it felt at least 50:50, people got lazy.
Ah yeah, everywhere you go you need to present passport and sometimes also book ticket in advance, so from tourist standpoint it's worse, before you could just show up same visit major sights in Beijing even without passport.
1/4-1/3 EVs is an underestimate for somewhere like Shenzhen (probably for Beijing too). It's going to be well over 50% there. And virtually all scooters will be electric.
You're right about the smoking, though. It's a massive problem.
it's definitely not underestimate for Beijing where I stayed for 3 weeks this summer, maybe you count PHEV as EVs, many of those cars which look like EVs are actually hybrids, only in late 2025 China reached 50% newly registered BEV+PHEV cars plus there are lots of previously registered cars and if we count only BEVs the percentage will be much smaller, actually I think 1/3 of BEV on the road is quite an overestimate from my side
are NEV common? sure. do BEV make majority of cars on the road? for sure not
there are basically none scooters, they use either (e)bikes or electric motorbikes/mopeds (these are not new, they used them en masse already 10 years ago)
Looking into this a bit more, it seems that 20% of the total number of registered vehicles in Beijing are NEV vehicles, but that a far larger percentage of cars on the road at any given moment are NEVs. That's because almost all taxis (and buses) are NEVs.
By the way, NEVs might have only reached 50% of new registrations across all of China in late 2025, but in Tier-1 cities, it has been far higher than 50% for years. It's extremely difficult to even get a license plate for an ICE car in major Chinese cities. You have to enter a lottery, with a very low chance of winning. Even if you do get a license plate, you're banned from driving on one weekday every week.
It's extremely difficult even to get NEV license plate, trust me I talked with many of those taxi drivers who drove me every single day during those 3 weeks about how much they paid for car, how long it took to register it. The benefit of NEV passed years ago already, even for NEV license plate you have to wait years.
TBH it was also expected trade - you will take care of elderly parents in exchange for their help with kids participation, so since boomer parents don't help they also can't expect help
my (divorced) parents (5+ and 2.5+ hours away by car) didn't help us with kids at all (wife's parents are 7500 km away), but they can't expect I will be taking care of them when they will be really old, after all my father and his sister put their own mother to retirement home, when she could not live alone by herself, so they should kinda expect the same treatment (although I was against it and wanted grandma rather die alone in her house earlier than suffer slightly longer in retirement home without her garden/animals), actually my mother put her mother to retirement home as well, though I think she wanted to go there, it was pretty great facility, it was very small house (studio), each separated part had one occupant with minigarden with meals minutes away + it was also <1km from her old big house, so not much change and not much difference for her since she lived in front of the living room TV anyway
not my experience with sleeper buses in Asia, in Vietnam they have these semi reclining "seats"[1] which can't be completely flat plus they are too short for European, so actually it's more uncomfortable experience than regular seat would be
OTOH I had pretty good experiences with some Indian sleeper buses, if new/good condition, you can even choose single berth with solid sliding aisle wall making it your own small private cabin [2], though it seems aisle curtains are more popular, bed is completely flat, you can even pull open pretty big side window to observe country, though of course it's not long enouigh berth for 2m European, for obvious reasons double berth shared with strangers is not very good experience but sometimes there is no other option
so I wonder how actually look these cama buses you specifically mentioned
Lego reminds me of Wikipedia, they lost the focus on their main goal
Wikimedia will claim they need more money to finance Wikipedia, but the reality is they use only minority of their income to actually run same manage the website everyone is interested unlike their other expenses
Lego is similar, they get into so many areas besides building blocks for kids to support their creativity and increase prices so much under pretense reasons, while you can buy same/better compatible bricks in China for 1/10th of the price, so it's clearly only the marketing, heck they don't need even to develop anything, people with alternate builds do it for them
it worked with p(l)andemics, why it wouldn't with online verification? they always come with some noble reason how to force something down the population throat and majority still falls for it
heck I don't see everyone boycotting and embarging US/Israel for their aggression against Iran, because they came up with good story once again, cough...Iraq WMD...cough
It's not really a Moon mission if it doesn't land on the Moon, is it?
But imagine mankind would finally put man on the Moon...
I was just thinking yesterday - wouldn't be nice if first man in the space was Russian, first man on the Moon (supposedly) American and first man on different planet/Mars was Chinese. They sure can pull it off.
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