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Enlarge / The McDonald's logo at a restaurant on November 4, 2019 in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Kena Betancur )

McDonald's Corporation has sued former CEO Steve Easterbrook to recoup a $40 million severance package, saying the company found evidence on its email servers that Easterbrook was lying when he denied having sexual relationships with employees. Easterbrook initially fooled McDonald's by deleting emails from his phone, allowing him to get the generous severance payment despite being fired, the lawsuit against him said. But months after paying him the severance package, McDonald's checked its email servers and discovered that Easterbrook sent nude photographs of employees from his work email account, the lawsuit said.

McDonald's said it also discovered that Easterbrook approved a stock grant "worth hundreds of thousands of dollars" for an employee he was in a sexual relationship with. McDonald's said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday that its lawsuit aims "to recover compensation and severance benefits that would not have been retained by Mr. Easterbrook had he been terminated for cause." The SEC filing includes a copy of the lawsuit McDonald's filed against Easterbrook in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware.

Easterbrook was forced out at McDonald's in November 2019 after an internal investigation found he engaged in "a non-physical, consensual relationship involving texting and video calls" with a subordinate, which violated company policy and "demonstrated poor judgment that disqualified him from continued service as the CEO," the lawsuit said.

Enlarge / The Air looks superficially the same as when we saw it in 2017, but almost every body panel has changed. (credit: Lucid Motors)

Like it or not, range has become the primary criteria by which electric vehicles are judged. Even though most Americans travel fewer than 73 miles a day, and the fact almost every EV owner wakes up to a freshly charged battery each morning, there remains a deep-seated psychological dread at the possibility of having to drop everything and drive from New York to California with as little time spent stationary as possible. Limited range remains frequently used as justification as to why the EV is a mere fad and will never actually catch on.

Well, road trippers, you'll soon need to find a new excuse not to go electric. Independent testing of the Lucid Air, which goes into production towards the end of the year, has determined that the car is able travel 517 miles (832km) on a single charge.

When I spoke with Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson earlier this year, he told me that the company was targeting at least 400 miles (643km) from a single charge, which would make the Air competitive with the longest-range EV currently on the market. But when FEV North America, a Michigan-based engineering company, put an Air through the EPA's multitest cycle procedure, the results were far in excess of this internal goal.