Awesomely Weird Alibaba EV of the Week: An electric car with a teeny tiny truck bed
There’s no denying that a pickup truck offers serious utility. Who wouldn’t want a cargo bed that you can chuck a 2×4 into from across the yard? But not everyone needs the excessive size of a typical truck, and thus I can appreciate the beauty of the good ol’ Chevy El Camino and Ford Ranchero. It’s a car that pretends to be a truck.
But what if you want a car that only has a weeeee little bit of a cargo bed? Oh, and you want it to be electric. And cheap as all get out. Well then you’ll want to head over to Alibaba and check out the odd little four-wheeler I’ve found for this week’s Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week.
The car appears to be known as the “JST” on its product page, where it is referred to as an SUV.
Unless the S stands for silly, then I’m not sure that classifier is quite correct.
The 3.2 m (10′ 6″) long car looks more like hatchback, except that it doesn’t have a hatch – or really a back either. There’s a cargo bed like a pickup truck, but it’s barely a foot long.
It’s more like an oversized glovebox mounted on the rear of the car, as if the car was designed to carry exactly one bag of dog food and that’s it.
The JST car is as small as it is oddly designed, but that’s what I love about it. It looks more like a Hotwheels fantasy car than a car you can actually buy from China for $7,200.
But let’s not laugh prematurely. Just because the car is weirdly proportioned doesn’t mean it lacks utility.
The cargo bed is short but fully-featured, including an actual tailgate.
The bed is only taller than it is long until you drop down the tailgate. That makes it perfect for carrying longer things, like 2 ft long 2×4’s instead of one footers.
Or you could use it for tailgating the big game if you have very few friends. Perhaps some socially distant tailgating, where everyone gets their own personal tiny car-truck.
I could also see the two-seater JST car as a perfect little grocery getter for a couple, provided they tend not to eat very much.
And keep in mind this isn’t just a small, weird little car-truck. It’s a small, weird little electric car-truck.
That means you can ride easy knowing you’re not burning dinosaur oil. In fact, the little 7 kWh battery is as small as that of a light electric motorcycle and could even be charged using solar power, if you were so inclined.
The only problem is trying to stack a pile of solar panels in the rear bed may prove too much for this tiny hauler.
At least it’d have the power to haul them, sort of. The 5 kW (6.7 hp) motor is probably just fine for the 680 kg (1,500 lb) vehicle. Normally I’d worry about overloading the car by overfilling the bed, but the JST comes with a convenient anti-overload feature. There simply isn’t enough space in the bed for anything too heavy.
It also ensures you won’t go too wild at the wheel either, with a top speed of just 60 km/h (37 mph). With a slight downhill and a prayer you might break into the 40’s of mph, but don’t expect to get anywhere too quickly.
That’s fine by me though. With a car that looks this good, I’d rather roll low and slow to give the people what the want: A nice long look at the future of automotive excellence.
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Entertainment
‘People want you to stay in your lane’: Reese Witherspoon on her ‘deeply personal’ decision to write a novel
It is “pretty surreal”, Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon admits, finding herself at the top of The New York Times bestsellers list.
When I meet the actress alongside her co-writer, best-selling author Harlan Coben, overnight the pair have learned that their thriller is now at number one.
He jokes: “I was texting her last night and saying you’ll now have to call yourself number one bestselling novelist, forget about Oscar winner!”
Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben told Katie Spencer about their novel Gone Before Goodbye
As one of the most successful authors in the world, Coben has sold over 80 million books to date, while for Witherspoon this is new ground.
Not content with running a hugely successful production company responsible for a string of hits, as well as one of the most successful book clubs in the world, she explains she felt compelled to give writing a try.
“People want you to stay in your lane… as a creative person I think it’s impossible to just choose one kind of life.
“Creativity is infinite and who I was as a creative person when I was 20 is very different from the person I am now at 49.”
Gone Before Goodbye, a thriller about a talented surgeon who finds herself caught up in a deadly conspiracy, is the result of Witherspoon daring to put her head above the parapet.
Witherspoon says she felt compelled to give writing a try
Coben admits he was “a little wary” at first.
“I don’t co-write novels but when she made the pitch and started talking about it, I was like ‘dang that’s good, we can do something with that’.”
While countless celebrities work with ghostwriters, Coben says: “I said to her from day one ‘it’s only going to be you and me in here… no third person in here, I don’t do that’. So every word you [read] comes from Reese and me.”
Coben has sold over 80 million books to date, while for Witherspoon this is new ground
Witherspoon explains: “He was like ‘if we’re going to do this, it’s going to have to be at a really high level because people going to expect a lot, so our bar was really high.”
“I said to her, in the beginning, novels are like a sausage,” Coben laughs. “You might like the final taste, but you don’t want to see how it was made and Reese got to see the full sausage getting made here.”
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When it came to writing, Coben says they “fell into a rhythm right away”, working together in three-hour stints, “back and forth with a yellow legal pad – what about this? What about that?”
Coben says they ‘fell into a rhythm right away’
Witherspoon says it “feels really deeply personal” to have their work now in print.
“Usually, as an actor, I walk into other people’s worlds and it’s already set up… but this was creating the whole world with Harlan and just from beginning to end feels very personal.”
While the story seems an obvious fit for being adapted to the screen, perhaps with a certain blonde actress in the leading role, Coben says that was never their intention.
“The biggest, biggest mistake novelists make when you write a book is to say ‘this would make a really great movie’. A book is a book, a movie is a movie, and we both focused on wanting this to be just a great reading experience.”
Given that their collaboration is already selling in big numbers, will the pair team up again to write a second?
Witherspoon says: “Let’s just see what people think of this one first.”
Kim Kardashian has revealed that she has been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm.
- Footage from the latest season of The Kardashians shows the reality TV star going for an imaging scan.
The 45-year-old appears to suggest her small aneurysm may have stemmed from stress.
Brain aneurysms are relatively common, with data suggesting they affect about one in every 50 people.
In many cases, patients may be unaware that they have one – as they tend to cause few symptoms when unruptured.
Brain aneurysms are common but often go undiagnosed. iStock file pic
Should an unruptured aneurysm grow to a larger size, it can cause headaches, balance problems and speech issues.
Those that burst are extremely dangerous and can prove fatal in some circumstances.
While aneurysms can emerge throughout the body, they are most typically found in the aorta, which carries blood out of the heart.
Research suggests brain aneurysms are most common in adults between the ages of 30 and 60 – with women disproportionately affected.
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Associate professor of neurology Dr Laura Stein told Sky’s US partner NBC News: ” The most well-described risk factors include a predisposition [family history of aneurysm], high blood pressure, cigarette smoking and inflammation.”
She went on to explain that most fatal ruptured aneurysms are in the brain, killing about one in three patients.
“When it’s a blood vessel that’s in the head and it bleeds, there’s a much higher risk of having a very bad problem just because the brain is enclosed in a fixed space,” Dr Stein added.
Low-risk aneurysms are monitored by doctors for growth or abnormalities, and there are a series of potential treatment options for those considered dangerous.
Elsewhere in The Kardashians clip, Kim admitted that her ex-husband Kanye West will be in her life “no matter what” because of the four kids they share together.
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