A Scottish couple just drove an electric vehicle from the North Pole to the South Pole!

It did take nine months and a bit of planning.

The car is a heavily modified Nissan Ariya, and they drove from the 1823 Magnetic North Pole to the South Pole in about nine months. North America was fairly easy for charging, South America was a bit dicey but they worked an agreement with an electric charging company to establish chargers in their corridor that the company will maintain for the people in the area and for future rally racers. When they didn't have chargers, they had a wind turbine and solar panels to power up their battery. When all else failed, they had a petrol generator and a support truck.

In 2017, the couple completed the Mongol Challenge in a modified Nissan Leaf, driving 10,000 miles in 56 days in a vehicle that does 90 miles in one charge!

Pretty intrepid people there! And they certainly like a driving holiday!

https://www.engadget.com/an-electric-car-completed-the-worlds-first-ever-drive-from-the-north-to-the-south-pole-073155506.html

The Google Drive data loss problem? Google claims it's all good. But is it?

The problem is that on Google forums, Google has locked the threads where people are questioning whether or not the fix works! If you can't discuss it with other people outside of the Google hive mind, how do you know whether it actually works in the wild?

One solution involves a previously unknown hidden menu in the Google desktop app. And initial feedback, before the forums were locked, were not encouraging. Another suggested recover path involved command line invocations, again, not many people reporting success.

And Google has locked the message forums for this. Are they washing their hands of the problem? Which kind of implies they know they have a catastrophic loss problem, meaning no way to recover people's data? This could lead to lawsuits as Google Drive is also sold as a commercial product that businesses rely upon, and it could literally destroy a business if its data is lost!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/google-calls-drive-data-loss-fixed-locks-forum-threads-saying-otherwise/

Bad news for Tesla: ANOTHER rental company dumping its Tesla fleet!

A European car rental company known as Sixt is dumping all of its Teslas due to costly repairs for the cars, particularly collision damage. In their place: 100,000 electric cars from BYD of China.

This is a general problem with Tesla, which is only going to be exacerbated with the Cyberstuck, err, Cybertruck. Body parts are hard to get replacements for when they're damaged, and a rental car that's down waiting for parts is not something that fleets can afford. Hertz was a big news story when they bought a ton of Teslas for its fleet, not so much of a news story when they got rid of them because of the costs when they got bent out of shape.

The Cybertruck is going to be even worse as the body panels are steel, it will be another factory part and they'll be devoting as much production as possible to getting completed units off the line for sale, not for collision damage repair.

Interesting story about the Cyberstuck moniker. A Tesla employee took a pre-production Cybertruck up a mountain in California to fetch a Christmas tree and got stuck. Didn't have the proper tires for off-road, much less snow and mud, and a software bug had disabled the locking hubs. It took a Ford F-150 to pull him free. But the worse part? The Tesla had NO TOW POINTS. Hopefully that's been rectified in the production truck, otherwise how is it legal? If it doesn't have tow points, I don't see how any right-thinking tow truck operator would pick one up as it would be hard to tow one without additional damage to it!

Interesting times.

https://jalopnik.com/rental-company-sixt-will-begin-dumping-tesla-fleet-due-1851081220

Disney just fired John Majors, the next Big Bad after Thanos for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)

Granted, they had good reason: Majors was convicted earlier today of assaulting a woman in a car. There are allegations of many other assaults, and there has been a hue and cry to fire him for many months as these allegations have started surfacing. One movie that he starred in - not a Marvel movie - was pulled from release because of this.

This bodes ill for the MCU. It's rough on a movie franchise to fire the next Big Bad when your big tent pole movie for 2026 was Avengers: Kang Dynasty. Thus far, Kang has only appeared in one movie: Ant Man and Wasp: Quantumania (which sucked, IMO) and in both seasons of the Loki series on Disney+. This Rolling Stone article lays out some possible ways to get around the firing of Majors.

The obvious solution is finding another actor, of which there are several options. People have been re-cast in movie series on a regular basis, this is totally doable.

For me, personally, I'd like to see them either dump or postpone the Kang series. The last Ant Man movie was not good, and it wasn't because of Majors: it was because they lost the path of Ant Man, a wise-cracking Average Joe. The great humor that was in the first two movies was completely gone and it just wasn't worth it for me. The thing that made the MCU work for me was the build-up to Thanos: you had all of these individual heroes eventually coming together, and a Big Bad emerges that took their combined strengths to defeat. Now the band is broken up, Cap and Tony are dead (for the time being), some new people are being introduced, let's get some individual movies out and rebuild the team rather than throwing another huge Big Bad on the screen!

AND ANOTHER THING! Stop referencing stuff from the Disney+ streaming service in the movies! There should be a firewall between those sides! That really ticks me off. AND GET OFF MY LAWN!

;-)

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/jonathan-majors-kang-marvel-fired-mcu-future-domestic-violence-loki-avengers-1234931990/

More on the conviction of John Majors for assaulting his then-girlfriend:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/jonathan-majors-found-guilty-domestic-violence-trial-1234928607/