Exactly. Every modern car in Europe, regardless of means of propulsion, will have lane keeping assist, emergency brakes, abs and all the other mandatory stuff and on top of that will have parking sensors, cameras etc.

EVs aren't loaded with high tech components. Particular manufacturers like Tesla might appear to go that way, but if you drive an EV by anyone else the exterior, interior and software isn't especially any different to any other vehicle of the same age regardless of propulsion. In some cases the car is even built on a vehicle platform suitable for EV or ICE variants of the same vehicle - most of Stellantis cars are that way. And EVs do have lower maintenance because they don't have mechanical parts that need replacement - timing belts, clutch / gears, cylinders etc.

Tesla does tend to make people make blanket assumptions about EVs though. e.g. Tesla does gigacasting to cut down on structural parts in the frame of a vehicle and maybe people assume this is the way it has to be. Except this isn't an EV-specific technology and other automakers are already beginning to copy them.

Vehicle safety in most countries is a regulatory requirement to prevent accidents, injury and deaths. It's not some vast conspiracy to make you pay more for a tail light. And boo hoo if it costs people slightly more money up front to avoid accidents.

I think you've stated the American way quite succinctly. Fuck everyone else on the road and sidewalks who you might hit because of the substandard safety equipment in your car. Your car insurance might be cheaper and that's all that matters.

Windows Phone was an immature phone operating system, with a primary handset manufacturer and didn't have the apps people wanted. So naturally the general public stayed away in droves. And other handset makers didn't leap at the chance to license and compete against Microsoft and its own hardware. And developers didn't see the point of porting their apps to some new platform with an entirely different development language and (limited) APIs.

So it died on its ass. Nokia handsets might have enjoyed more success if the CEO hadn't hadn't decided to go "burning platform" (his words), destroying confidence in the company and its products, causing mass layoffs and basically selling that portion of the company to Microsoft. At least Nokia corp managed to buy it back but it's a shadow of its former self.

The same could be said for putting fake beaches into map data. Probably more so because if this company visualized where people "found" their pokemons on a map then people faking map data would stick out like a sore thumb. e.g. if they are supposed to be a beach and there will be a bunch of dots on maps that are conspicuously nowhere near beaches - welcome to banheim.

As for GPS, I expect their main method of catching people using fake GPS is them traveling improbable distances or warping around. If the fake location were credibly simulating motion, e.g. a road trip then I doubt it would stand out at all. Fake GPS locations also have uses outside of a game too - to defeat information gathering by apps, security, privacy etc. so there is likely more interest in that kind of software.

In development that you don't optimize unless you need to and something that works is better than something that doesn't. That doesn't mean you write terrible unmaintainable code, or outside of requirements - you are still expected to use common sense for data structures, memory efficiency and whatnot. But just get it going and you might find it's quite sufficient. If needs be then you can go back in and focus on performance tuning it.

Assuming someone was into this shitty game and wanted to cheat then it would seem easier to just run a fake GPS app, or install the game in an emulator where fake GPS data can be fed in from debug tools.

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.