Manufacturing

When most people need a new pair of earbuds, they’re picking from a pretty small set of brands, usually chosen from Amazon or, worse, the Apple Store. Then there are the outliers, the ones who haunt forums like Head-Fi, who speak knowledgeably about balanced armature versus dynamic drivers, who test their equipment and produce frequency charts. Increasingly, those outliers — a subset of audiophile culture — are obsessed with a wide variety of no-name Chinese brands selling earbuds that often cost less than $25. The outlier obsessives buy these by the dozen from the back pages of AliExpress, write or perform exhaustively researched reviews on blogs and YouTube, and debate endlessly the pros and cons of headphones that cost about as much as a large pizza.

Supercar Hongqi S9 sits on display at the Frankfurt Auto Show in Frankfurt, Germany, Sept 10. 2019.

Hongqi, a brand under China's leading automaker FAW Group, launched two new concept models -- the S9, a supercar prototype with butterfly-doors, and the electric SUV E115.

Both of the models were unveiled at the ongoing Frankfurt Auto Show on Tuesday.

Battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd will invest up to 1.8 billion euros ($2.05 billion) in expanding its European production and research base.

The investment will be used to construct a lithium-ion battery production base and a center for product research, development and testing, CATL said in a statement on Tuesday.

The founder and president of NIO - Li Bin - at NYSE, photo in 2018.

China's electric car startup NIO recalled 4,803 ES8 vehicles, about one-third of the company's first batch for delivery, Beijing Youth Daily reported on Friday.

The company also promised to compensate all property losses caused by accidents due to battery quality according to law, the report said.