Teslas have a radio receiver module which is a board encased in sheet metal. I haven't found pics of the actual circuit board inside but I assume it has a digital tuner IC and the part number would reveal if it already supports AM or not. Even if it didn't, then chances are there is another IC in the same family that does. e.g. STM has this range of tuner ICs and AM is defacto there on on all of the ICs that have receivers. So at most maybe a small hardware revision to enable AM and the changes in the software to utilise it.

My wife's Tesla has FM and DAB. I don't know what tuner IC the Tesla uses for its cars but there are vehicle digital radio tuners that are all-in-one & support AM/FM/HD/DAB etc That isn't to say the US being so backwards about AM is good in its own right but the lobbying by carmakers rings hollow.

As for electric cars and some "widespread emergency" - I expect electric cars have disadvantages and advantages. People who have solar on their rooftops and electric vehicles are likely going to have power & charge regardless of what situation the grid is in and far more of it than someone with a generator alone. Owning a generator would be a good idea too, and it could can also charge EVs so hardly any worse really. Some EVs can also to V2L or V2H so if you were without power and had an EV, you could use it to power lights and appliances. But if we're talking zombie apocalypse levels of emergency I'm sure if the EV doesn't work you can just take someone else's vehicle.

People were walking around in the 70s with AM/FM radios that fit in their pockets. This is not complex or expensive technology to support, so the excuses wheeled out that it affects range or costs too much etc are just laughable. That isn't to say I agree with the idea that all cars should have to support AM, or that the US shouldn't modernize it's emergency broadcasting tech to render the need for AM moot. But the automotive industry isn't exactly convincing in its opposition.

More likely it got dropped because someone in Tesla figured out it represented a 30c cost to the vehicle. Same reason they constantly iterate and cheap out on other things including things they should not be touching like indicator stalks.

I have no idea if ZETA is a genuine group or some astroturfing bullshit, but claiming it affects EV range, or cost is a pretty ballsy lie. Radios powered by watch & AAA batteries can receive AM radio so it would have neglible impact on EV range, or cost. And besides, if that's the demented logic path they want to go down then ban satellite radio and 4/5G data since surely both of those would have way more impact on range and cost.

I doubt RISC-V will eclipse ARM but I fully expect Google are dumping it because of what you say, that they don't stand to profit from supporting work that Chinese forks leech off.

Maybe it's just a pain in the ass for Google to maintain when the main beneficiaries are domestic Chinese AOSP forks where Google wouldn't see any return for their efforts. So they dump support and put the development burden on these forks.

EU airlines are obliged to provide a refund or compensation and/or return flights at the earliest opportunity in the case of cancellation depending on circumstances and what the customer wants. Also things like accommodation, food etc. It's much stronger than what the US is announcing, covering overbooking, downgrades, connecting flights etc as you can see from the website. Even in terms of what kinds of circumstance trigger compensation it is stronger.

The only significant change I see is US airlines have to refund automatically. I would be nice if the EU did this, but even an obligation for airlines to inform customers to initiate a claim would be a step up. That said, I only claimed 5 years back soon after it went into effect and circumstances may have changed since.

They had no obligation to provide snacks after we landed. That was just a cynical calculus to placate & cancel negative thoughts in passengers about the delay they just suffered. Even if one or two people on the whole flight don't claim because they got a "free" chocolate bar then its obviously worth it to the airline.

BTW I looked up delays and the threshold for 600 euro compensation on a >3500km flight is 3 hours not 4, so either I misremembered or the rules changed since this happened 5 years ago.

3rd party cookies are only distinguishable because they're issued by requests & scripts from domains other than the origin. I could easily see ad networks producing some kind of spyware-in-a-box container that resides in the domain itself. So the client requests scripts and cookies coming from the domain but they're emanating from this container that is synced up to the third party somehow.

Won't that be a fun security nightmare if that happens? Not only a bunch of spyware crap that is harder to distinguish from site content, but a bunch of fun new ways for attackers to inject malicious content into websites.

That's more or less it. You have to know to claim compensation and chase up the airline to get it. They sure as hell won't tell you, or automatically credit you with compensation. That probably means if a flight is delayed that only a fraction of the people will bother to go to the effort which might involve chasing down the forms and filling them in.

The EU is even stricter. If your plane is delayed by a certain number of hours you can also be claim compensation that varies depending on the delay and the flight duration. The funniest example of this happening to me & family catching a Virgin flight from Orlando to Manchester (back when the UK was in the EU). Takeoff was delayed by nearly 5 hours and the pilot floored it hoping to land under 4 hours but ultimately the flight took 4 hours and 2 minutes which was above the compensation threshold. We were able to claim 600 euro *each* for the delay which is more back than we paid for the return flight in the first place.

The interesting part to this is that of course Virgin *never* mentioned to customers they could claim compensation. But they absolutely knew they could get reamed because when the plane disembarked there were reps handing out snacks and drinks to the people coming off. The airline's calculus must be that most passengers (especially from the US) were ignorant of their rights or could be assuaged by a chocolate bar and wouldn't research the matter further. But I knew and made the claim which paid for half the holiday. We also helped ourselves to their free snacks too.

Every modern car regardless of propulsion could be bricked by an electronics failure or because some online cloud service gets discontinued and somehow makes the car non functional. It's certainly a concern but it's one at an industry wide level and drags in things like right to repair, protocol buses, open standards etc.

Toyota has pivoted away from hydrogen to ammonia of late but it's just more FUD in the same vein as their previous efforts. It's possibly even more insidious since NH3 is also hydrogen based and you can bet your boots that it would be made from fossil fuels and palmed off as "green" even though it plainly isn't. Fortunately it is likely to be even less successful than their hydrogen FUD.

That isn't to say there may be situations where ammonia could be considered a viable fuel source, but these are niches and certainly not for private passenger vehicles or other kinds of road freight.

I was watching a YouTube video about the Orkney Islands which has a lot of windfarms and one of the guys in charge of their energy operation said they used excess energy to generate hydrogen. But even the way he said it made clear this was not a viable or desirable thing to be doing, just that the energy would go completely to waste otherwise. Orkney's problem was the interconnector to the mainland couldn't export this excess but they're upgrading it so that by 2027 they can.

So resorting to hydrogen production can be seen as a problem with infrastructure rather than something desirable. I think even if a place has an excess of energy and nothing to do with it, that there are options which would be safer and still allow the energy to be reused, e.g. for cold climates superheated gravel or sand batteries are becoming viable and could be used to heat homes or for industry (boilers, kilns etc.) that would otherwise use fossil fuel for the same.