📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: China’s BYD launches ride-hailing focused EV brand w

Recent regulatory filings indicate that BYD is preparing a significant brand restructuring with the launch of its new sub-brand, Linghui, aimed at clearly separating a new group of vehicles from its core product portfolio. As part of this effort, four models – the Linghui e5, Linghui e7, Linghui e9, and Linghui M9 – have already been submitted for approval, signaling that the rollout is moving quickly from planning to execution.

Although positioned as a distinct brand, Linghui appears to be built on BYD’s proven engineering foundations. Early documentation suggests that several of the new models are derived from existing BYD vehicle platforms, but presented under a fresh visual and market identity. 

This approach allows BYD to expand its lineup efficiently while reshaping how different segments of its business are perceived by consumers and investors alike.

Linghui lineup highlights battery-first strategy across new models

Rather than being positioned simply as new nameplates, BYD’s first Linghui models are designed to showcase the company’s latest battery and electrification strategy across multiple segments. All four vehicles rely on BYD’s in-house Blade Battery architecture, emphasizing energy density, thermal stability, and long-term durability – which are the key differentiators as competition intensifies in China’s EV market.

The flagship Linghui e9, derived from the BYD Han, will be offered with two electric motor options delivering up to 150 kW, aligning it with the brand’s premium electric sedan positioning. The Linghui e7 continues the approach with multiple motor configurations aimed at balancing efficiency and performance, CarNewsChina reported.

The more affordable Linghui e5, based on the Qin Plus EV platform, adopts a single-motor setup focused on cost-efficient electrification for high-volume buyers. At the top of the range, the Linghui M9 stands apart with a plug-in hybrid system that combines BYD’s proven 1.5-liter engine with a 200 kW electric motor, highlighting the brand’s dual-track electrification roadmap.

A defining trait of all of these models is their heavy use in ride-hailing fleets. Along with vehicles like the BYD Qin Plus, they have become popular among mobility platforms due to their strong value proposition and low operating costs.

Ride-hailing dominance is eroding consumer brand perception

Market dynamics show that ride-hailing operators prioritize vehicles that deliver the strongest cost-to-performance ratio, often selecting models purely on economic efficiency. While this approach ensures rapid fleet expansion, it creates a branding challenge for automakers whose vehicles become overly associated with ride-hailing services.

Once a brand is perceived primarily as a fleet or ride-hailing choice, consumer perception shifts, CarNewsChina notes. Private buyers increasingly view the brand as low-cost or utilitarian, making it difficult to sustain any premium positioning – and this effect has already reshaped parts of China’s EV market. 

Against this backdrop, the launch of the Linghui brand reflects BYD’s effort to isolate its fleet and ride-hailing exposure from its main consumer business. With large numbers of BYD vehicles already operating in ride-hailing fleets across China, creating a dedicated ride-hailing-focused brand allows the Chinese automaker to protect its core brand positioning while responding to mounting competition and slowing domestic sales.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Humans may communicate with aliens in mathematical l

If humans ever receive a message from intelligent aliens, the biggest challenge may not be how far away they are, but how to communicate at all. Our nearest star system is more than four light-years away, which means even a simple question and reply could take over a decade. 

In such a scenario, spoken words, gestures, or cultural symbols would be useless as these only work when both sides share the same biology and experience—conditions that would not exist between civilizations that evolved on different planets.

So what could possibly connect aliens and us? A new study suggests the answer is mathematics. The researchers argue that math may be one of the few things intelligent beings across the universe could genuinely share. They even tested this theory on bees, and the results were surprising. 

In our study, we “discuss the possibility that if humans, bees, and other non-human animals possess or can acquire numerical concepts, whether mathematics could be a model for a universal language,” the study authors note.

Bees can understand and learn basic maths

We don’t know any aliens to test a universal language on. So, how do you check whether something like mathematics truly transcends species? The researchers behind this study took a creative detour by looking at one of the most alien intelligences on Earth—honeybees.

Humans and bees split from a common ancestor more than 600 million years ago. Their brains are dramatically different in size, structure, and function. We rely on spoken and written language, while bees communicate using the famous waggle dance, a physical movement that encodes information about food sources—direction, distance, angle relative to the sun, and even quality. 

Despite these differences, both species live in complex societies and exchange meaningful information. “Bees and humans are separated by over 600 million years of evolution, yet we share similarities in communication, cooperation, and mathematical ability,” the study authors said.

Between 2016 and 2024, researchers conducted a series of experiments with freely flying honeybees. In these experiments, bees were trained to look at simple visual displays showing different numbers of shapes. Depending on the task, certain colors or symbols acted as instructions.

For example, one color meant add one, while another meant subtract one. If a bee chose the correct answer, it received sugar water; if not, it received no reward. Over many trials, the bees learned the rules, began applying them to new situations they had not seen before, and demonstrated remarkable basic mathematical abilities.

The experiments showed that bees could perform simple addition and subtraction (specifically adding or subtracting one), understand the concept of zero, order quantities, know which group had more or fewer items, classify numbers as odd or even, and learn to associate symbols with numbers, similar to how humans learn numerals like 1, 2, or 3

Connecting maths and alien communication

These results are surprising because a bee’s brain contains fewer than a million neurons, compared to the human brain’s roughly 86 billion. Yet even with such limited hardware, bees could grasp numerical ideas. 

The researchers point out that once an organism can add or subtract one, it theoretically has the foundation to represent all natural numbers. In other words, bees show the first building blocks of mathematics—not through language, but through cognition.

So if extraterrestrial intelligence exists, and if it has sufficiently advanced cognition, then it is also likely capable of mathematics. 

This also means that if two species as different as humans and bees can independently develop and understand mathematics, then math may not be a human invention at all. Instead, it may be a natural outcome of intelligence itself and could function as a universal language.

Interestingly, the idea that mathematics could act as a universal language is not new. Renowned mathematician Galileo Galilei famously described the universe as being written in mathematical language. 

The next challenge is to understand how flexible mathematics really is across species, and whether shared concepts can be scaled up from simple counting to more abstract ideas. These insights won’t just shape the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; they could also reshape how we think about intelligence itself.

The study is published in the journal Leonardo.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com