Month: September 2017

Enlarge (credit: David Rogers/Getty Images)

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has pledged to stop building cars powered solely by petrol and diesel. The company hopes that every car built after 2020 will either be fully electric, or a hybrid that makes use of both an electric motor and a traditional petrol-powered engine.

"Every new Jaguar Land Rover model line will be electrified from 2020," Jaguar Land Rover boss Ralf Speth said in a statement. "We will introduce a portfolio of electrified products across our model range, embracing fully electric, plug-in hybrid and mild hybrid vehicles."

The move comes just months after rival Volvo Cars confirmed that it would electrify its entire range of vehicles by 2019. Between 2019 and 2021, Volvo plans to launch five new electric vehicles, while every other car in the range will feature some form of hybrid engine. Honda has also promised that all of its new models from 2020 on will have an electrified variant.

Ask any enthusiast and they'll tell you the same thing—if you want to build a good electric vehicle, you have to start from the ground up. You sandwich the battery pack between the axles, keep the center of gravity nice and low to counteract all that weight, and go from there. That's why cars like the Model S or Bolt are so much better than Californian compliance cars. But we'll make an exception for electric restomods, stuff like one of Zelectric's electric air-cooled conversions. Jaguar evidently agrees with our exception; while next year's I-Pace was designed as an EV from the ground up, you can't say the same for its latest, the E-type Zero.

The starting point was a Series 1.5 E-type convertible, built in Coventry some time between 1967 and 1968. More recently it returned to the city and to Jaguar, which has a nice sideline these days restoring its old cars and even building continuations of things like the XKSS. Here's where things get really interesting. Rather than just give it a nuts and bolts restoration before selling it to a deep pocketed Jaguar lover, someone decided to take out the old XK straight six engine along with the rest of the drivetrain and replace it with an electric motor and batteries.

Enlarge / We could all use a little levity in the IT world (especially if you lived in the path of Hurricane Harvey). (credit: Aurich / Getty)

HOUSTON—I had enough to worry about as Hurricane Harvey plowed into the Texas Gulf Coast on the night of August 25 and delivered a category 4 punch to the nearby city of Rockport. But I simultaneously faced a different kind of storm: an unexpected surge of traffic hitting the Space City Weather Web server. This was the first of what would turn into several very long and restless nights.

Space City Weather is a Houston-area weather blog and forecasting site run by my coworker Eric Berger and his buddy Matt Lanza (along with contributing author Braniff Davis). And a few months before Hurricane Harvey decided to crap all over us in Texas, I watched Eric and Matt struggle with Web hosting companies during previous high-traffic weather events. Thus, I offered to host SCW on my own private dedicated server (and not the one in my closet—a real server in a real data center). After all, I thought, the box was heavily underutilized with just my own silly stuff. I'd previously had some experience in self-hosting WordPress sites, and my usual hosting strategy ought to do just fine against SCW’s projected traffic. It’d be fun!

But that Friday evening, with Harvey battering Rockport and forecasters predicting doom and gloom for hundreds of miles of Texas coastline, SCW’s 24-hour page view counter zipped past the 800,000 mark and kept on going. The unique visitor number was north of 400,000 and climbing. The server was dishing out between 10 and 20 pages per second. The traffic storm had arrived.

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When a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a libel suit brought against Techdirt's Mike Masnick, the decision was a victory of sorts for the First Amendment. And it may be short-lived.

Mike Masnick (credit: Eric Goldman)

Even so, the ruling, which followed two-plus decades of legal precedent, brings to mind how lawsuits like this can be used as a weapon to stifle the First Amendment and extract huge settlements to make the issue literally disappear.

Masnick fought the allegations that he defamed Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who claims to have invented e-mail. Ayyadurai sought $15 million in a lawsuit against Masnick and Techdirt parent company Floor64 over blog posts that labeled Ayyadurai a "fraud" and a "liar" surrounding Ayyadurai's "fake" claims to have invented e-mail in 1978 as a teenager in New Jersey.