I think you have misunderstood "gardening leave". Most Formula One employees are in the UK, so it's UK law. In general non-competes haven't traditionally been used in the UK, but this seems to have changed in recent years.

However, a one-month or longer notice period has been common in the UK. It was quite typical for employees to give a one-month notice and their employer telling them to to stay home for that month. That's gardening leave.

Gardening leave was usually only required when moving to a competitor. I knew someone who got gardening leave by refusing to name his new employer and the old employer gave him a month of gardening leave out of caution.

Or how about the earlier Wickard v. Filburn?

https://www.oyez.org/cases/194...

The Mirai weighs about the same as the larger Tesla Model 3. So that's another thing that early promoters of hydrogen claimed (lower weight) that turned out not to be true.

The California ban on non-competes has an exception, which is probably the only valid reason: If you are a business owner and you sell your business to another company, the contract for that sale can have an enforceable non-compete for you (but not your employees).

For anyone who bought a Mirai, it was obvious that they had backed the wrong horse before buying. Either the buyers did no research or they trusted Toyota's reputation far too much, or (more likely) both.

Tesla had started building the Supercharger network a couple of years before the Mirai was introduced and Toyota was clear that the Mirai was a car to be used in limited locations. You might not make it between San Francisco and Los Angeles because the Harris Ranch hydrogen station may be offline.

Forklifts prove otherwise, the technology for using compressed hydrogen is ready ... it's just not well suited to passenger cars.

I think liquid hydrogen range extenders make more sense for passenger cars, once trucking has moved to liquid hydrogen and created the refueling infrastructure. Drive as EV 99% of the time, use liquid hydrogen for road trips and pulling your boat and just accept any remaining hydrogen will boil off if the car sits for a couple weeks.

If that argument holds, the court will decide. But as with every contract, they can be ligitated if one side feels wronged.

A car is a tool to move people and stuff from A to B, and without fuel, it ceases to fulfill its promise, on which it was sold.

True, but what happens when the smelters cool off? I know that a cooled off steel plant is basically scrap. Not sure about aluminum though.

The data shows mostly that those estimates were too conservative, the Tesla batteries have less degradation than previously thought. My Prius batteries also had a 5 year factory warranty, but they are still under warranty by Toyota even 10 years later as it turned out they never degraded to the point they had to replace more than a few per year.

Cars with no or insufficient thermal management are a different matter, but as long as you have good thermal management it shouldn't be an issue.

I fully expect smart batteries to become mandatory in cars in the EU in a few years, basically as soon as the standards crystallize to the point where there is a clear winner. However, that does require beefing up the power net and local transformers, which is a program that is underway at least in my country.

The transition won't be painless but it will end up providing a lot more power at lower prices with less environmental impact. It will just be a painful to get there as we need to do something in a decade that previously took up a century.

Not only that, but now that we're actively looking we are also discovering more deposits, for instance in Portugal. Belgium discovered minable deposits in the groundwater, that should long term provide enough lithium for 125K carbatteries per year, which should be plenty for Belgium. Italy, Spain, NOrway and Sweden also had Lithium discoveries recently.

I don't think Lithium supplies will be the issue. Really *cheap* lithium supplies, now that's another matter. EU mining will never compete with China or South-America on cost, since the safety measures are already more expensive than in China and S-A doesn't really need very expensive measures since it's surface mining.

The politicians and military didn't hate nuclear, they hated the third world having nuclear material.

Meanwhile the nukees loved burning sodium and spinning fairy tales about proliferation proof reactors more than anything (they are very reluctantly accepting lead has to replace their beloved sodium pyres now).

Sure the greens hated nuclear an sich, but they are mostly a scapegoat.

Affordable is to a certain extent a matter of perspective. Can we afford a tiny part of our ridiculous consumption to use hydrogen, technically it looks likely we could .... politically, not so much.

If the west scales PV and hydrogen to PWh scale storage, it will become cheap enough for the whole world. The room for cost reduction is huge.

For net zero without nuclear, far more is still needed for hydrogen electrolysis.

If we don't manage to use electricity to merge neutron stars, it's probably not feasible. Until then it's like making gold from lead by nuclear processes: doable, but the price per atom is not market compatible.