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If the question is why are non-alcoholic drinks so expensive if they are not taxed, the answer is simple

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Taking a look at the drinks menu of any establishment is a contradiction: non-alcoholic beer It is worth the same as one with alcohol. The same thing happens as with the decaffeinated coffee and the easiest thing is to think that it doesn’t make sense. If you don’t have alcohol, the rules don’t apply. specific taxes on alcohol. The problem is that there are a lot of factors that come into play. The contradiction. Than the price of non-alcoholic beer equal The counterpart with alcohol is something that is not reserved for locals: it is also seen on supermarket shelves. The price of these versions not only equals that of alcoholic beverages, but can exceed it in some cases, and is not limited to beer: also non-alcoholic wine or to refined alcohol products. It’s… strange, especially considering that there are a series of taxes levied on alcoholic products. Guardian echoed this situation, pointing out that the prices of a liter of non-alcoholic beer It is 5% higher than the alcoholic counterpart in supermarkets, 25% higher in pubs. Cider without is 10% more expensive than with and with wine and liquors Something curious was happening: the same price or cheaper in the supermarket, more expensive in the bars. Taxes. In the United Kingdom, about 10% of the price of beer are taxes, but it is not something exclusive to the islands. In Spain, Italy or France there is also the tax to beer and it depends on whether they have more or less alcohol, also if it is artisanal or not. Wine has VAT in Italy, Germany and Spain, but in France it has a tax between 4 and 10 euros per hectoliter and the highest taxes are observed for distillates. That is to say, it is evident that part of what is paid for a non-alcoholic drink is taxes and logic tells us that, if a drink does not have alcohol, it should be between a little cheaper -beer- and much cheaper -0% spirits-. The reason why this is not the case is quite simple. R&D. There are three elements that come into play to prevent it from happening. The first is that, in many cases, production is more complex and expensive than that of alcoholic beverages. In the case of non-alcoholic beer and wine, production starts exactly the same as with alcoholic versions. This implies that the drink is made with fermentationwhich is what raises the graduation. However, then you have to take that extra step that costs money: dealcoholization. It is something that involves specific technology to remove alcoholic content preserving both flavor and texture. In the elimination process, part of the liquid is lost, so producers must use more raw materials to “fill” and, in addition, the alcohol works as a flavor enhancer and, when eliminating it, it is necessary to incorporate additional ingredients such as extracts, aromas or whatever each brand has in its formula. In short: it is not so much the ingredients as the times and processes, which are not eliminated with alcohol, but rather increased. “The industry has made the decision that non-alcoholic drinks are versions of premium products, seeking to ensure that ‘non-alcoholic beer’ is not associated with something cheap and of lower quality” Economy of scale. More or less. That is one of the factors. The second is that yes, it seems that we have embarked on the fashion to stop consuming so many alcoholic beverages. It is something that the industry, especially the beer and wine industry, has observed in recent years, when there has been a significant increase in consumers of non-alcoholic products. If we look back, the non-alcoholic beer market has explodedbut if we look at the total, non-alcoholic beverages only represent a small percentage of volume sales in the alcoholic beverage market. Since there is less demand than the counterpart with alcohol, they do not benefit from economies of scale. That is: the factories that produce bottles, cans, labels, advertising and the alcohol products themselves produce such a high quantity that the cost per unit is low. When non-alcoholic drinks are produced, different labels are made, but as the quantity produced is smaller, the cost per unit is higher. As for the big brands: the independent ones that only produce non-alcoholic drinks have invested a lot of money in research and machinery and cannot afford aggressive margins because they want to recover that investment. and psychology. And the third factor is something that seems silly, but also plays an important role in all of this. The Guardian article alluded to the fact that wine or non-alcoholic spirits were priced the same or lower than alcoholic versions in the supermarket, but in bars, things were different. And it is something that has to do with the positioning of the brands and the perception of the user themselves. Mixing the psychology and marketingif the price of one of the products were significantly lower, it could be perceived as inferior quality. Therefore, in the case of beer, for 0.0 to be seen as a legitimate substitute, the price must be comparable to the alcoholic equivalent. If we see a price equal to or slightly lower than the alcoholic equivalent, the reason may be that it is a version made by an already established brand, with a massive infrastructure that allows them to play with margins and their own brand image. And it also comes into play that non-alcoholic beers from not so long ago were pretty bad. They have improved a lot in recent years, but John Holmes, director of Sheffield Addictions Research Group (a public health think tank based at the University of Sheffield), point that, to improve the image, “the industry has made the decision that non-alcoholic drinks are versions of premium products, seeking to ensure that ‘non-alcoholic beer’ is not associated with something cheap and of lower quality.” He assures that “if you want to reform the reputation of a product, you launch a premium version.” … Read more

There was a time when HTC sold more phones than Apple and Samsung. The question is what happened next: Crossover 1×28

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In 2002 we still didn’t have smartphones, but I was lucky enough to see a preview of that future. I traveled to London with Microsoft and at that event the company presented the Orange SPVa big-headed and different mobile because it was based on Windows Mobile 2002. In it you could surf the Internet, write emails or listen to music, although in a limited way because neither the software nor the hardware were very competitive at that time. And yet, the vision was clear: everything was going toward those devices. What was surprising was not only that, but who manufactured that device was HTC. The Taiwanese firm was already beginning to be known for manufacturing devices for others, but it would soon end up launching into the smartphone market taking advantage of the push of Android. In 2011 its market share in the US became superior to Apple’s or Samsung, but after that achievement, the firm started making bad decisionsand other manufacturers joined in – especially from China – who began to make competition much more difficult. HTC never recovered from that and although it experimented with other segments like virtual realityfaded to a paper totally secondary in the technological field. We talk about all this in a new episode of Crossover in which we remember the great milestones of the company and that singular fall almost into oblivion. In Xataka | “It is a brutal economic effort, but we have to act now”: parents who are taking their children to schools without screens

If the question is whether you have to pay garbage tax for a parking space in Madrid, the answer is: good luck with the Cadastre

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April 8, 2022. The Government publishes in the BOE Law 7/2022, on waste and contaminated soils for a circular economy. Behind this name hides a small bomb that has been exploding, little by little, in each municipality. In Madrid, that detonation has come this year. Beyond the calculation, there are thousands of car parks that are now wondering: do I have to pay the new garbage fee? Where do we come from? My colleague Carlos Prego explained it a few days ago in Xataka. Madrid has recalculated its garbage rate, making reference to the famous Law mentioned above with a calculation that the OCU has come to define as “original and unfair”. The point is that controversy has arisen because Madrid City Council said “eliminate” this rate in 2015, alleging that they removed the tax burden from the citizen. The 2022 Law obliges municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants to begin collecting it, following European guidelines. To calculate that rate, The City Council has taken into account the cadastral value of the apartments or the tonnage of garbage that is collected in each neighborhood. That is, those who live in a neighborhood where more garbage is generated will pay more… and that directly affects neighborhoods with great tourist activity (hotels, tourist apartments…), commercial or very densely populated. a truce. The criticism has been so virulent on the part of the oppositionof the neighbors and of the associations of consumers who the City Council has partially rectified. They assure that now it will be taken into account the number of registered in each household looking ahead to next year. But what happens where no one lives? Yes, where, for example, there is a parked car because we are talking about a garage. And the garbage rate also affects the owners of a parking space… At least, apart from them. and a battle. Because although the neighbors seem to have received a truce with the new calculation in the garbage rate, which, yes, the City Council continues to defend that it will have little impact on obvious changes for neighborsthe new open front is what happens to the parking lots. And the door had been opened for a neighbor to have to pay a garbage fee for his home and another garbage fee for his parking lot. Despite the fact that, obviously, the garbage generated by a parking space is minimal or non-existent. Little more than general cleaning if we talk about a community parking lot. However, the rate taxes the provision of the service of collection, transportation and treatment of urban waste, in the words of the College of Administrators. That is, the same person (house and garage) could be charged for a single garbage collection. Who pays then? Those who will pay. Those owners of parking spaces whose parking lot is registered in the Cadastre as a “parking-industrial-use warehouse”, in the words of a circular sent by the Madrid College of Administrators to the Property Administrators of the Capital. What does this mean? They clarify it from the Cadastre which, upon consultation with one of these administrators, have confirmed that they are those independent garages that cannot be accessed from a home or from the common areas of a building. That is, those in which garbage is collected individually. Those who will not pay. Those owners of a parking space whose parking is registered in the Cadastre as “residential use”. Or, in a simplified way by this last entity, which are accessed from a home or from common areas with another building. In that case, they may be communities of different owners (garage and building) but if access is from the same common areas, the former will not pay the garbage fee. What does the City Council say? That they adhere to the type of land use specified in the Cadastre and, therefore, that it is the latter that specifies who should or should not pay the garbage rate. The only solution given in this case by the College of Property Administrators of Madrid is for the community to present a declaration of cadastral alteration to specify that the land use is residential and does not correspond to industrial use. The other alternative is to present a written due to discrepancies with the description of cadastral use. Photo | Kertis Stick and Madrid City Council In Xataka | The best horror movie of this winter has been released. And the protagonists are the owners of a home in Spain

171 million euros later, Metro de Madrid wants to reopen line 7B. The big question is whether the tenth time will be the charm.

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Line 7B of the Madrid Metro will fully reopen this same month of November after more than three years closed. It is the tenth attempt to normalize a service that was inaugurated in 2007 and that has accumulated more than 800 days without functioning since then. The total cost of repairs reaches 171 million eurosnot counting compensation to neighbors, which already exceeds 23 million and continues to increase. A disaster that began in 2007. When Esperanza Aguirre promoted this expansion to have it ready before the regional elections of 2007, no one could imagine the consequences. The construction of the tunnel seriously altered the subsoil by bringing salt and water into contact, which caused the progressive dissolution of the soil. The result: collapse of the tunnels, massive water leaks and structural damage to hundreds of homes in San Fernando de Henares and Coslada. According to internal documents obtained by El Paísalready in 2008 the technicians warned of the “risk of collapses in the metro tunnel and the surrounding buildings”, and in 2009 they warned that action was “extremely urgent.” The figures of the disaster. The repair bill includes 117 million invested by the Ministry of Transport in works and compensation, 49.7 million from the Canal de Isabel II in hydraulic infrastructure, 2.4 million from the Metro itself and 1.7 million from the Ministry of Education to demolish the El Pilar educational complex. In total, more than 171 million euros. But the number will continue to grow: Property compensation, which in 2022 was estimated at 12 million, has already reached 23.3 million and there are nearly 300 open files. Additionally, 73 homes had to be completely demolished, leaving families paying mortgages on homes that no longer existed. The technical solution. To stabilize the ground, the Community has injected more than 11,000 tons of mortar of concrete in the subsoil through 26,000 drillings that reach up to 45 meters deep. It has also deployed 179 mini topographic prisms inside the metro and laser sensors that send daily data on ground movements. The Polytechnic University of Madrid analyzes also satellite images to detect any anomaly. According to the Minister of Housing, Transport and Infrastructure, Jorge Rodrigo, 511 surveillance elements and five robotic stations have been installed that will constantly monitor the road, the land and nearby buildings. The neighbors don’t forget. Although the Community assures that the infrastructure now presents “stability” and meets “the necessary security conditions”, those affected they maintain their mobilizations and demand greater compensation in court. Furthermore, a study by the Polytechnic University detected “considerable movements” in distant areas “without stabilizing”, although without specifying more details. For the 120,000 inhabitants of San Fernando de Henares and Coslada, the November reopening is just the first step to move forward in almost two decades of nightmare. And now what. The Community will allocate an additional 8.2 million to surveillance and maintenance contracts to act immediately in the event of any incident without the need for emergency contracts. Line 7B will be the most monitored infrastructure of the Madrid Metro, precisely because it is the one that has caused the most problems. It remains to be seen if this time the line is truly stable or if it will close again, as has happened on nine previous occasions. Cover image | Zarateman (Wikipedia) In Xataka | Madrid and Lisbon will be linked by the AVE. It will only arrive (if it arrives) 24 years late

If the question is how spacious the Starship will be, the answer is yes

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Last week, NASA’s acting administrator proposed study alternatives to SpaceX’s Starship to send astronauts to the Moon before China does. SpaceX has just published a blunt response. A paradigm shift. The self-imposed moon race against China has made the United States forget the real reason why NASA chose the SpaceX’s gigantic Starship for his return to the Moon. As SpaceX itself has been responsible for remembering in a long publication Loaded with images, technical details and advances that we were unaware of, its Starship HLS (Human Landing System) is not a lunar landing module like that of the Apollo missions: it is a paradigm shift designed to build a permanent lunar base. Size comparison between Starship HLS and the Apollo lunar module This is Starship HLS. The comparison is almost comical. While the Apollo lunar module, that took the first humans to the Moonmeasured seven meters high, Starship HLS will rise vertically to 52 meters. To put it in terms of room to stretch your legs: The Apollo lunar module had the habitable volume of a wardrobe (4.5 cubic meters). The Lanyue spacecraft that the Chinese astronauts will use has twice the volume. Starship, according to SpaceX itself, will have two-thirds of the pressurized volume of the entire International Space Station (613 cubic meters). What’s more, the SpaceX ship will have two airlocks for exits to the surface. Each of them will have a habitable volume of 13 cubic meters, which means that a single Starship airlock is more spacious than the Chinese lunar landing module that NASA is so concerned about. Render of the Starship HLS cone inside A luxury apartment. If the size comparison wasn’t enough, new renders of Starship’s interior show a level of comfort that no spaceship has ever had outside of sci-fi movies. Forget the image of astronauts crammed into an aluminum can. What we see is a spacious, multi-story interior, with a clean and futuristic aesthetic. There is a spiral staircase, a control area with multiple seats and a bay window offering panoramic views of the lunar surface. Astronauts inside Starship HLS A beast of burden. Starship is not designed to carry new American flags to the Moon. As SpaceX has taken care to remember, it is designed to fulfill the initial promise of the NASA’s Artemis program: create a “permanent and sustainable presence on the Moon”, building a lunar base. Starship cargo variants will be able to land up to 100 tons directly on the lunar surface. This includes pressurized and non-pressurized rovers, nuclear reactors for power generation like the one NASA wants to install before China, and prefabricated lunar habitats. 2026 will be the moment of truth. SpaceX says it has completed 49 key milestones in Starship’s development, including demonstrations of life support systems, testing of landing legs, qualification of the docking adapter, and demonstrations of the elevator and airlock. However, the big obstacle remains refueling ships in orbit to compensate for the evaporation of cryogenic fuel, something that SpaceX hopes to achieve in 2026 with the new Starship V3. Without fuel transfer in orbit, Starship cannot reach the Moon with its crew and its 100 tons of cargo. Images | SpaceX In Xataka | The enormous size of Starship, in images that give an idea of ​​its scale In Xataka | A genius named Tom Mueller designed the engines for the Falcon 9. And now that genius wants to beat SpaceX on its own turf

Anthropic is spending much more money than it brings in. The question is how long can it continue like this?

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How much does AI cost? That question can be answered by AWS, which has billed Anthropic a whopping $2.66 billion so far this year. The problem is twofold, because in that same period it is estimated that Anthropic has earned 2.55 billion dollars, so with that alone it has spent more than it earns. But Anthropic has many more expenses and the accounts, once again, do not work out in the AI ​​segment. Why is it important. The data revealed by Ed Zitron confirms the problem they face all AI startups: They spend (much) more than they earn, and that trend does not seem to be reversing. In fact, although these companies are growing in revenue, they are also growing proportionally in expenses. And the question, of course, is whether this pace is sustainable. The Anthropic case. According to Zitron data, in 2024 Anthropic earned between $400 and $600 million, but spent $1.35 billion on AWS, that is, 226% of its income. The trend appears to continue in 2025, because the share of spending on AWS is 104% of its revenue. It seems that things have improved, but that expense does not include what it costs Anthropic use Google Cloud infrastructureanother of its partners in all its operations. The expenditure on it is also likely to be enormous, which complicates the situation. The mystery of unexplained costs. The unaccounted cost gap is also enormous. In 2024 Anthropic’s total spending was estimated at 6.2 billion dollars. If we know that he spent $1.35 billion on AWS, there is $4.85 billion left that is not explained. That suggests that spending on Google Cloud and other operational costs is absolutely astronomical. In fact, computing costs may be much higher than we thought. Another startup desperate for investment. Meanwhile, Anthropic continues to raise capital. Zitron analysis reveals that between 2023 and 2025 achievement raise investment rounds for a total of 37.5 billion dollars (20,000 of them in 2025 alone). A good part of that money came precisely from the companies that provide infrastructure: Amazon and Google. Despite that funding, Anthropic appears as desperate as OpenAI to raise new rounds of investment. The company run by Dario Amodei recently resorted to money from Middle Eastern countries, for example. Spending continues to skyrocket. The study figures further reveal that Anthropic spends more the more time passes. In January 2024, it spent $52.9 million on AWS, but in December 2024 that amount rose to $176.1 million. In September 2025, it is estimated that spending on AWS was no less than $518.9 million: the escalation in costs is very notable. And he tightens the screws on Cursor. One of Anthropic’s most important clients is the startup vibe coding Cursor. This company has clearly been affected by that situation, and Cursor’s costs on AWS doubled from $6.19 million in May 2025 to $12.67 million in June. Just in those Anthropic months implement the so-called “Service Levels” with which it forced business customers to spend a minimum amount and pay higher rates for prompt caching, a special component designed for startups that use generative AI models for programming. What did Cursor do? Increase prices (and apologize for it) of your customer subscriptions. This can’t go on like this forever. For Zitron, always very critical of this reality of AI companies, the conclusion is clear: Anthropic’s costs are out of control. In fact, he argues that they increase practically linearly with respect to revenue, which makes their business model unsustainable. The only solution is to increase prices drastically (possibly 100%) to become profitable. The problem is that the market accepts paying twice as much at once for AI as it currently pays for. Image | Anthropic | Taylor Vick In Xataka | Anthropic says Claude Sonnet 4.5 can clone a service like Slack in 30 hours. The reality is more complicated

If the question is whether we can have a cheap electric car in the short term, Skoda’s answer is clear: “no”

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The cheap electric car is, at the moment, a mythological being. At least if we want it to offer us the same autonomy performance as a combustion car. And that variable continues to be what puts manufacturers back when they have to electrify their access versions. The last to make it clear: Skoda. “That’s for sure”. These are the words of Klaus Zellmer, CEO of Skoda, who has confirmed that “we will not electrify our basic models, such as the Fabia, the Kamiq or the Scala” in an interview with Automobilwoche. He then noted that they will keep them as mild hybrid models but “we will not launch them as purely electric vehicles, that’s for sure.” Why does an electric car have less autonomy than advertised? What Zellmer is not clear about, he explains in the interview, is that there is enough potential customer to make this cheap electric car a sufficiently profitable product. “But…”. The “buts” are the big problem with the low-cost electric car. And that big but is, without a doubt, autonomy. Yesterday we explained that an electric car can be much cheaper than a combustion one if the type of use accompanies it. This “cheaper” is more pronounced in cities where electric cars gain in consumption, in the price of electricity compared to fuel and maintenance (due to having a lower risk of breakdowns). The problem is that when the driver wants to go on a long trip he has to accept some discomfort. And not everyone is willing to do so. Does it make little sense to define your purchase by two long trips a year? Maybe, but here each one must evaluate How much is your time and money worth? Many people are still not compensated. The strategy. For now, we know that Skoda will have its own version of a 25,000 euro electric car but it will not be released below this price. That is, he will have a brother Volkswagen ID.2 either Pole ID but he will not put on the market a brother of the Volkswagen ID.1the electric version that the German company will have in the range of 20,000 euros. The movement makes a lot of sense. The Volkswagen Group uses the pull of the Volkswagen brand to champion the electrification of the automobile conglomerate. Launching an electric Skoda would force it to place it below its German brother due to the positioning of both companies in the market and they do not believe that there is sufficient demand to keep two models alive. There is another detail to take into account, Renault has demonstrated with the Five that can sell many units of an electric car for between 25,000 and 30,000 euros. But it has done so with a very strong commitment to design and care, positioning it as a perfect car for the urban environment but also positioning it as the second beautiful, practical and cheap car in a home. sell a lot. This is what a manufacturer needs if they want amortize the investment in an electric car low price. And the profit margins have narrowed in that segment given that the price of the battery continues to represent a very high cost in relation to the final price of the vehicle. To this we must add the safety obligations of the European Union, which have also made the survival of this type of automobile difficult. Although the price of the battery has been falling (and is expected to continue doing so in the futureThe truth is that making a low-priced electric car profitable is very complicated. It is necessary to adapt production lines, have an adequate supply of batteries and, if you want to achieve maximum performance in autonomy and behavior, design your own platform. That is why some manufacturers have chosen to share platforms (like Volkswagen and Ford) or renew cars that were becoming obsolete with a profound update to reposition them in the market as a new car, trying to amortize the initial investment, as in the case of the Dacia Spring. Run before walking. What they defend at Skoda is that the transition has been done too quickly and that it is impossible for manufacturers to meet the given deadlines. We may more or less agree with this statement but the truth is that the public is not buying electric cars at the expected rate. And those cars worth between 20,000 and 25,000 euros are testimonials. In fact, of the 10 best-selling electric cars in Europeonly the Renault 5… and the Skoda Elroq are sold for less than 30,000 euros. Of course, for now the threats of multimillion-dollar fines remain. first with a term that ends in 2027. Those who exceed an average of 93.6 gr/km of CO2 in their fleet sold since 2025 will be punished with a fine of 95 euros per gram of CO2 exceeded and car sold. That is, if the fleet of cars sold is one million and the average has been exceeded by one gram/km of CO2, we are talking about a fine of 95 million euros. In 2030, that limit should be cut in half, leaving virtually everything that not be an electrified carthat’s why at Skoda they talk about maintaining their access models “until the end of the decade.” From there, 2035 should be the year in which cars with combustion engines will not be sold. Something that is in the air at night pressure from big manufacturers and countries like Germany o Italy with a large automobile related industry. Photo | Skoda In Xataka | Denmark wants to make the electric car its only path. And it has done so by punishing those who buy cheap gasoline cars

The question is not if there will be another AWS outage, but when and how the next one will catch us

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Yesterday there was a fall in Amazon Web Services infrastructure which affected a multitude of services. Many AI tools did not work, nor did games like Fortnite or Roblox, streaming platforms, applications and much more. Additionally, at the same time there was a failure in the Redsys system (according to the company, unrelated) that left all payment services in Spain out of play. It’s not the first time this has happened and it doesn’t look like it will be the last. How can we prepare? Amazon falls. The failure occurred around 9 a.m. (Spanish time) at the AWS data center in Northern Virginia and caused a global butterfly effect. The DownDetector home screen showed a Dantesque panorama; Dozens of well-known services were experiencing downtime around the world. AWS reacted quickly and a couple of hours later they were already up and running their systems. And Redsys. Around 11 in the morning, the dataphones, Bizum payments and even the ATMs also began to fail. At first we attributed it to the AWS failure, but according to Redsys it had nothing to do with the Amazon Web Services failure. Regardless of whether it was a coincidence or not, for a few hours many people were left without access to their money and Redsys is the main payment service provider in Spain and one of the most important worldwide. Cash. In the case of failure of ATMs and dataphones, the solution is obvious: carry cash for what may happen, a habit that many of us do not have. In addition, it is also advisable not to keep all the money in the same bank, for example having a savings account separate from the rest for emergencies. Yesterday wouldn’t have been of much use, but if only our regular bank’s system had failed, we could access the other one. Diversify. As with money, it is not advisable to put all your eggs in the same basket in the case of the apps and services we use. The biggest problem may be if one of these outages affects communication services as happened with WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook in 2021. In this case, it is best to have an account in other apps through which we can stay in touch. In fact, that time Telegram was the big winneradding no less than 70 million users. Dependence. The fall of Amazon Web Services is an example of the enormous dependence on the cloud, a sector in which Amazon is the undisputed leader with a 31% market share. It is followed by Microsoft Azure with 20%, Google Cloud with 12% and Alibaba Cloud with 4%. The pie is shared among very few companies and, if one fails, the impact is very great. It’s happened before. In September 2015, Amazon Web Services suffered another “blackout”” that affected many services such as Netflix, Reddit, Medium, Tinder and more. Already then the enormous dependence on Amazon’s cloud was evident and what happened yesterday makes it clear that the situation remains the same and even worse. Redsys also experienced a drop two years ago it affected bank payment systems. The dataphones, some ATMs and other services such as Bizum did not work. The situation was quite similar to what occurred yesterday. There have been more cases, such as last year’s Crowdstrike crash. Microsoft’s cloud-based cybersecurity platform knocked out the systems of airports, hospitals, and many more companies. And it will happen again. Fortunately it is not common, but errors of this type they happen all the time. The problem is when they occur in such large infrastructures on which so many services depend. Yesterday’s error on AWS occurred in the service that is responsible for distributing traffic among its servers, but also may come from other causes such as faulty updates or incompatibilities. Image | Markus Spiske, Pexels In Xataka | Red Eléctrica still has not stabilized the voltage half a year after the blackout. It is not a technical failure, it is a geographical mismatch

The question now is why the car was not opened.

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A Xiaomi SU7 Ultra has caught fire after a serious accident on Tianfu Avenue in Chengdu, the largest city in western China. The accident, which took place around 3:16 AM on October 13, has ended the life of the driver, a 31-year-old man who was trapped inside the vehicle while the flames consumed it. The images of the event have once again generated an intense debate on the safety of electronic handles in electric cars, a topic that It became popular after the first Tesla to incorporate this feature and that they have adopted a good part of the vehicles in the premium segment. China is about to change this regulation. What happened. The driver, identified by authoritieshit another sedan, crossed the median of the road and the car immediately caught fire. Several drivers passing by the area stopped to try to help him. The videos show how they tried to break the windows by hitting them with their elbows and shoes, without success. They then used a fire extinguisher, but the flames and intense heat prevented them from getting closer. After the firefighters arrived, who put out the fire, only the chassis remained: they had to use hammers and electric saws to cut the doors, which could not be opened manually. Why didn’t the doors open? local police confirmed that the driver was allegedly under the influence of alcohol. However, the focus of the controversy has focused in the vehicle’s electronic handles, which allegedly remained locked throughout the fire. Although some users on social networks they speculate Since the locking system was activated after the impact, the Chengdu and Xiaomi Auto authorities have not yet issued an official statement in this regard. This type of handles, popularized by Tesla a decade ago with the Model S, they depend on electrical energy to function, and in the event of a loss of power after an accident, they can prevent the occupants from exiting. The impact on Xiaomi. Xiaomi shares in Hong Kong fell up to 9% during the day on Monday, closing with a loss of 5.71%. It was the worst day for the company since April. This is not the first fatal accident involving a vehicle from the Chinese brand: at the end of March, an SU7 that was traveling in intelligent driving mode hit an obstacleburned and killed three university students. That event led Xiaomi to announce in September the software update of its driving assistance system in almost 116,900 SU7 units, after the Chinese regulator warned that the system could fail to detect certain scenarios. A problem that goes beyond Xiaomi. The safety of electronic door handles is part of a hot debate that involves the entire electric vehicle industry. In September, the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation on Tesla for the handles of the Model Y manufactured since 2021, after it was learned that several people were injured or died when they could not open the doors when power was lost, especially after accidents. In another case earlier this month, a wrongful death lawsuit alleged that the Cybertruck’s door handle system caught a 19-year-old young man inside the burning vehicle. Also Rivian is redesigning the doors of its upcoming R2 SUV to include a more visible manual opening system following concerns from its employees. What does Chinese regulations say? The country has a public consultation phase your new standards security. These standards also include changes that are specifically aimed at the use of electronic door handles in vehicles. These changes are expected to come into effect soon, so they should put even more pressure on automakers to develop these types of levers. Cover image | Xiaomi and Weibo In Xataka | Chinese laptops are less and less imitating other people’s successes: the latest from Anbernic is identical to a Nintendo DS

The Meta Ray-Ban Display wants to replace the smartphone. The question is whether they will be able to do it: Crossover 1×25

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Mark Zuckerberg believes that In 2030 we will not take our smartphones out of our pockets so much because we will do almost everything from the glasses. This may be a fairly accurate prediction, especially after the launch of the Meta Ray-Ban Displayconnected glasses that are an important qualitative leap compared to traditional Ray-Ban Meta. Precisely to talk about If glasses can end up replacing the smartphone We have gotten together Jaume Lahoz, Jota and a server in Crossover 1×25. In this new episode we discuss everything about a launch that is certainly promising and even disruptive. So, we begin by talking about the integrated screen on the right lens of the glasses, an extraordinary option that allows you to display notifications and relevant information at all times. Added to this is that bracelet with electromyographic technology for gesture control, a fantastic way to interact with the interface of these glasses. Of course there is a worrying hidden face in this product: privacy risks. As with their predecessors, glasses can be used to capture images and video of what is in front of us, and that can spark new controversies in this regard. We also talk about how several manufacturers in China have similar models that even surpass Meta’s glasses in technical performance. And of course we review the history of devices that already wanted to tempt us in 2013 with the legendary Google Glass. Will other large technology companies enter this race? It seems inevitable, but the real question is whether glasses will actually become a great alternative to smartphones. Mark Zuckerberg is clear that yes. If you want to know what we think, We encourage you to take a look at the debatewhich we think has turned out great and interesting. Enjoy it! On YouTube | Crossover

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