Surely the Tesla and Leaf also have a resistive heater? A heat pump is not going to produce a useful amount of heat when it's -10F out.

It's said that you should look carefully at a used luxury car, because they were often owned by people by people who stretched to simply purchase the car, and couldn't afford the upkeep.

With the said, if you can manage to find a well maintained one, it can be a bargain as luxury cars tend to depreciate quickly. However, the manufacturer will still gouge you for parts, so it's helpful to get one that shares major components (engine, transmission) with a non-luxury model.

Even if the engine makes it, the transmission won't. For some reason BMW thinks that you shouldn't have to change the transmission fluid so it's a non-serviceable, sealed unit. They last about as long as you might expect a transmission to last if you just drove it and completely ignored the fluid.

It's not a manufacturer thing. Around here some dealers have started offering a "lifetime" warranty. It's non-transferable, and generally has some asterisks attached to it, such as you have to have the every 15k mile service performed at the dealer or some such. They're obviously banking on the fact that most people don't keep cars more than a few years, and even if you did, that you'd eventually mess up the maintenance schedule and end up voiding it. Though I still wonder what they're going to do with the occasional oddball that manages to keep the warranty going then has a major breakdown on a rusted out 20 year old car. Maybe they just plan on worrying about that when the time comes.

The smart way would be to make the important electronics relatively inaccessible so you'd have physical evidence that someone was accessing them (scratches on the case, soldered on JTAG connector, etc.). But if you can upload new firmware to the engine computer over the CAN bus then all bets are off I guess.

There were these consultants who couldn't their fancy new Linux server to authenticate with our domain. They literally spent two weeks at it (at $100's per hour) over a five month period and still couldn't make it work. One evening after they went for for the day I noticed they left the console logged in as root. Well, 10 minutes poking around in /etc and I figured out what the problem is. We fired them after that.

Well, the trend used to be that you would replace an otherwise perfectly functional computer because it was obsolete. Nowadays, it seems the trend is that people run their computers longer and a lot more are getting replaced only because they fail. Of course, I could argue that computers nowadays don't last as long either, as things like the capacitor plague and ROHS have sent a lot of otherwise useful hardware to the dump.

Even if the drivers were closed source, it would still be a boon for projects like ndiswrapper.

Next up, autonomous forklifts?

Actually, that's probably a lot closer to reality than fully autonomous OTR trucks.

Unless cars become a lot more durable (which may actually happen with electrics), it's not like the total number of cars sold will decrease that drastically. If you consider a modern car good for 200k miles and an average speed of 40MPH, then it's only good for about 5,000 or so hours of use before it's scrapped. The reason it'll last 15-20 years is that it spends the vast majority of its time shut off and sitting. If the car is constantly running as part of a motor pool then it may only last 2-5 years or so before it accumulates 200-400k+ miles and is worn out. The automakers may end up liking this new era where a car only lasts a few years and there is a constant demand for replacements, which would help smooth out some of the ups and downs of the current car market.

Interestingly, this could also mean that the only older autonomous cars on the road would be ones with private owners that don't see the kind of heavy use as the shared cars and thus last longer. Could it be in the future that having a well-kept 10+ year-old car could be a thing of prestige?

It's because it's assumed that you're just going to run the AC when it's hot out. Even doing simple things like positioning windows with respect to the prevailing winds to get a breeze going through the house isn't done either.

Not really hijacked, but in 2003 a 727 was stolen still has not been found:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Boeing_727-223_disappearance

Most likely scenarios are that the plane crashed into the Indian ocean or was taken to a remote location in Africa and broken up for parts.

If anything, I've found he seems to automatically hates Korean cars, though maybe that's changed as I haven't watched the show in a while.

I don't understand how Helios Flight 522 could be related to anti-terrorism measures. The cause of the crash seems to be pretty clearly due to some horribly incompetent pilots who failed to check the state of the pressurization before takeoff, then completely failing to recognize the problem once they were in the air.

Another idea is that you make a regulation that always requires two people in the cockpit, and then redesign the system so that there are two switches that must be pressed simultaneously to lock the door that are positioned in such a way that one person can't physically trigger them both at the same time. This has its own flaws, most notably that if one person is left in the cockpit during a terrorist attack, they can't lock the door. But at the same time it would prevent a lone person from being able to barricade themselves in the cockpit and do as they please.