Month: June 2020

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  This is a rendering of the Lordstown Motors Endurance, a new electric work truck that's being revealed on June 25 in Lordstown, Ohio. [credit: Lordstown Motors ]

Good news, everyone: the battery electric vehicle market is about to get more crowded. On Thursday, Lordstown Motors unveils the Lordstown Endurance, a new BEV truck aimed at the fleet market. The $52,500 truck goes into production next year in Lordstown, Ohio, at a former General Motors factory, and unlike forthcoming BEV pickups from Tesla and Rivian, this one is aimed squarely at the commercial and fleet market.

If news about a US-made electric pickup geared toward the work truck market sounds familiar to you, that's understandable. In 2018, we took a look at the Workhorse W-15, a carbon-fiber plug-in hybrid EV work truck that was designed in Ohio. But Workhorse ran into funding problems and decided to shelve the W-15. It also let go its CEO, Steve Burns, who licensed some of the W-15 technology for a new project. That new project was Lordstown Motors, named for the town in Ohio where its factory is located. It's a factory that built Chevrolet Cruises until it was closed last year in a widely criticized cost-cutting exercise by General Motors. (GM and LG Chem have also chosen Lordstown as the site of a new battery gigafactory.)

It looks like a normal truck

The first thing you notice about the Endurance is that it looks like it was styled to blend in on an American worksite, not to stand out on the surface of Mars. "We really tried to strike a balance on the looks, since we cater to fleets," Burns told me when we spoke by phone on Wednesday. "We thought, let's keep the vehicle so that at least it's a pickup truck. It has a bed and a cab and a hood, but let's make sure—because a lot of fleets are very proud that they are putting their names on the side of an electric vehicle—let's make sure folks can point to that and say, 'Oh, that's one of those electrics,'" he told me.

Enlarge / Thanks to Section 230, Twitter is not legally responsible for the content posted to its service by alleged bovines. (credit: Laurence Mouton | Getty Images)

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) cannot sue Twitter for defamation over the contents of tweets posted by a parody account posing as Nunes' cow, a Virginia judge ruled Wednesday.

The ruling (PDF) from judge John Marshall found that Twitter is "immune from the defamation claims," as first reported by the Fresno Bee.

Nunes in 2019 filed a $250 million lawsuit against three Twitter accounts as well as the service itself alleging defamation, negligence, and conspiracy. One of the three accounts belongs to an identifiable person, Republican political strategist Liz Mair. The other two are clearly parody accounts: One, @DevinCow, posing as Devin Nunes' cow, and the other, @DevinNunesMom, posing as Nunes' mother.

Enlarge / Kimberly Newman, the lead plaintiff, in a 2019 YouTube video. (credit: Kimberly Newman / YouTube)

Four Black YouTubers have sued YouTube, arguing that the online platform discriminates against Black content creators like themselves.

YouTube "knowingly, intentionally, and systematically employs artificial intelligence algorithms, computer and machine based filtering and review tools to 'target' Plaintiffs and all other persons similarly situated, by using information about their racial identity and viewpoint to restrict access and drive them off YouTube," the lawsuit states.

In their 103-page lawsuit, the four women detail a variety of challenges they've faced over the years as YouTube content creators. On several occasions, YouTube demonetized some of their videos, blocking them from generating revenue via ads. They say these decisions were made based on vague criteria with no meaningful opportunity to appeal. They also fault YouTube for failing to take down—and in some cases even promoting—"hate speech videos targeting the African American community."