Honorable Mentions

iFit: Unfortunately, so many fitness apps require proprietary equipment. But if you’ve got the itch to travel, I recommend iFit, which partners with NordicTrack, ProForm, and FreeMotion equipment. You get world-class athletic instructors with jaw-dropping natural scenery from all over the world for workouts that are both stunning and entertaining. I may not be able to ride a pump track with Ashleigh McIvor in real life, even if there wasn’t a pandemic. But on iFit’s platform, I laughed out loud from the exhilaration of flying behind her as the bike tilted up and down. I loved it so much, in fact, that my own mother bought the treadmill and has been enjoying her own global walks at home.

Zombies, Run!: If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “The only way I’d start running is if I had to flee for my life,” you can now start practicing. Zombies, Run! is an award-winning audio survival game that’s secretly a fitness tool. Once you connect your headphones and start your workout, an audio guide narrates your fitness journey. In an apocalyptic, zombified world, it’s your job to scavenge resources for your ragtag band of human survivors and evade death.

The app is free, but you can pay for the Abel Runner’s Club version to access all eight seasons and features. In addition to heart-pounding audio storylines and narrated adventures, there are also virtual races, stat tracking, GPS-enabled maps, and the ability to connect with your Apple Watch or Google Pixel Watch. I have no doubt it’s effective—I burned at least 5 to 10 calories just listening in fear to the YouTube trailer.

Smash Your Fitness: If you’re a cyclist, you probably have a trainer set up for what WIRED writer Robbie Gonzalez once called “human hamster-wheeling.” If you find Zwift boring, you might want to consider a new cycling game called Smash Your Fitness. Cyclists strap on a “Smashometer,” a small, rechargeable ankle device that transmits leg speed to the game via Bluetooth, or directly to your smart trainer via Bluetooth or ANT+.

You cycle through a sci-fi universe that feels like you’re suspended in space, while riding on a track akin to a revolving strand of DNA or a natural world that’s a compelling virtual facsimile of Europe or the Southwest. You can pedal with friends remotely or join paced group rides led by virtual ride leaders. A hunky AI coach can also spit out a workout program after feeding him some basic data. Pre-made workouts can be as short as five minutes or as long as several hours.

There are a lot of moving parts with Smash that a cyclist like me who just wants to get some quick exercise might not want or need. For example, cyclists have the option to “steer” the bike using their phone or keyboard. When this feature is turned on, there’s a risk of crashing, which I did at least 10 times in one ride. Throughout a month of testing, I found that the app isn’t quite easy to use. I never could sync it with my Zwift Hub smart trainer. The company promises that connectivity bugs will soon be worked out, but until then it’s up to the Smashometer to carry the ride. Also, the companion app is still waiting for approval from Apple and the Google Play Store. —Steph Pearson

Courtesy of Yoqi

Yoqi: Qigong is the ancient Chinese practice of using breath control and body movements to gather life energy (known as qi) and redistribute it around your body and back into the earth. It’s also a great way to start your day on an energetic note. Qigong exercises are done in a standing posture, and the gentle activities slot somewhere between Tai Chi movements and your favorite standing yoga poses.

I picked up a daily qigong practice thanks to a series of videos by Marisa Cranfill of Yoqi.com. Her company’s name says it all: Cranfill designs routines that are a combination of yoga and qigong, with equal emphasis on breathing, balance, meditation, and Chinese medicine. Also, the integration of yoga elements makes for an easier onboarding experience for those who are well-versed in yoga but new to qigong.

There are a bunch of free videos on Yoqi’s YouTube channel, including a 30-minute video for first-timers. Start there. Once you’re up to speed, a $15 subscription earns you unlimited video views on the company’s website. Cranfill also has some fun audio meditations you can download for $15 to $30 each. —Michael Calore

Yoga with Kassandra: My personal favorite online yogi is Yoga with Adriene‘s Adriene Mishler, and not just because we have the same name and own the same breed of dog. But in WIRED’s offices, I’m outnumbered by fans of Yoga with Kassandra. It all comes down to personal taste—I’d say Adriene is more chatty and casual, and Kassandra more efficient and business-like.

There are plenty of online yoga instructors to try if neither personality quite gels with you. If Adriene cooing that a pose is “yummy” makes you cringe, you can also give Jessamyn Stanley or Yoga with Tim a shot. I also enjoy Cosmic Kids Yoga with my children on weekend afternoons. For more tips, check out our story on Everything You Need for Your Yoga Practice.

Dance Church: If you miss walking into a club, getting your heart pumping, and thrashing your arms wildly around with a bunch of sweaty, ecstatic strangers, then Dance Church might be for you. The online platform offers crazy dance sessions led by real-life dancers, with a variety of bodies, dance styles, and (I have to say it) wonderful apparel. The company does lead live classes in-person that are pay-as-you-go, but a $19 per month on-demand subscription gets you continuous access to both live and on-demand dance sessions. This is a good option if you’re fitting in exercise sessions with small children who think it’s the height of both fitness and entertainment to jump up and down on the couch beside you.

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Unlike Elon Musk with his list of broken promises, the stats don’t lie. Tesla has lost the title of the world’s largest maker of EVs to Chinese automaker BYD. The signs have been there for a while, with BYD besting Tesla sales in Europe a number of times during 2025. Now it’s official on a global basis.

Despite being blocked from entering the US market, BYD’s seemingly unstoppable rise continues as its EV sales rose last year by 28 percent to 2.25 million. In contrast, Tesla announced today it delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025—its second annual decline in a row, and a 16 percent year-over-year decline for the fourth quarter. This is not merely the China brand edging ahead of Tesla in the electric vehicle race; it’s a marked shift.

Last week, BYD stated that in 2025 it sold 4.6 million “new energy vehicles” (which includes both full EVs and plug-in hybrids) globally, with more than a million of these being exported cars. Its passenger vehicle exports specifically were up more than 145 percent year-on-year.

The news comes after a frankly disastrous year for Tesla that saw the high-selling Model Y, crucial for both Elon Musk and his car company, get a half-hearted refresh that bombed, failing to reverse sales woes. It was also a year that disclosed just how few people bought the much-berated Cybertruck; in March, yet another recall revealed the company had apparently sold less than 50,000 electric pickups since customer deliveries began 14 months previously. Musk had told investors Tesla would sell 250,000 Cybertrucks per year.

With Tesla sales down in the US and in free fall in Europe, Musk turned to US president Donald Trump for help. Trump obliged by morphing the White House South Lawn into a makeshift Tesla showroom, claiming he would himself purchase a racy Model S Plaid. But by June it was reported Trump might be selling the car after publicly falling out with Musk.

Just last month, EV news site Electrek reported that Musk’s SpaceX had bought tens of millions of dollars worth of Cybertrucks that supposedly Tesla can’t sell. (You can see the pickups all lined up at SpaceX in this video.) If true, that move would significantly bolster Tesla’s financial performance in 2025’s fourth quarter, providing at least some respite for the automaker after the US ended its EV tax credits at the end of the third quarter.

“Tesla still has formidable assets, brand recognition, manufacturing know-how, and a strong installed base,” says Andy Palmer, former COO of Nissan and former CEO of Aston Martin Lagonda. “The challenge is that the market has matured while the product line has not moved fast enough. People are struggling to justify spending on a Tesla when other brands, including those from China, are delivering more innovative and advanced products.”

This blurring of the lines between audio and health devices looks set to be a trend across the industry. “We really want to make sure that we take care of our customers’ hearing,” says Miikka Tikander, the Helsinki-based head of audio at Bang & Olufsen. Tikander points to recent data about the decline in hearing health in young adults and reports that there was a lot of emphasis from manufacturers on ANC and hearing health at the AES’ Headphone Technology conference in Espoo, Finland this August.

“Apple has a big lead in that area,” he says. “We want to make sure that our headphones can adapt, make this choice [on when to block out sound] on your behalf, if you let it, of course. Some people don’t like that idea, but if there’s a noisy event in your surroundings, the headset can take care of it, just tune it out a bit and get you back to normal listening once you are away from that noise.”

Enter the “Sound Bubble”

Hearvana AI is one startup looking to go much further than the AirPods’ current suite of noise canceling and ambient noise features. Cofounded by Shyam Gollakota, a computer science & engineering professor at the University of Washington, and two of his students, Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, Hearvana recently raised $6 million in a pre-seed round which included none other than Amazon’s Alexa Fund.

One of the startup’s first big innovations was “semantic hearing,” which was the first project they approached, around three years ago. The team built a hardware prototype—a pair of on-ear headphones with six microphones across the headband, connected to an Orange Pi microcontroller—to test out a model that had been trained to recognize 20 different types of ambient sounds. This included things like sirens, car horns, birdsong, crying babies, alarm clocks, pets, and people talking, and then allowed the user to isolate say, one person’s voice as a “spotlight,” and block out all the other frequencies.

“So I’m going to the beach and I want to listen to just ocean sounds and not the people talking next to me, or I’m in the house vacuum cleaning but I still want to listen to people knocking on the door or important sounds, like a baby crying,” explains Gollakota, who is based in Seattle. “And that’s what we solved first. This was the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a door knock. They sound pretty different, right?”