Getting a chip made IS the big hurdle. Soldering the chip is trivial by comparison.

A Sprinter is a tradesman's van. Outside the US, Mercedes aren't a luxury car maker, they are a general vehicle maker who also makes luxury cars. Aside from normal white vans, they also make buses, trucks, and cheaper cars that are popular as taxis.

The box is small and cheap, and is much easy to change when some new codec comes along making it obsolete, and you can keep the existing display.

If data can be charged (not something I've heard of) no one is actually charging for it. I can roam anywhere in the EU with no roaming charges on Vodafone.

How much does it cost for the user, though? Is it metered? If it is metered, you'll want a good proxy setup in front of it to block things like requests for ads, block the operating system's "phone home" and software updates while connected, block videos etc. as these can chew through gigabytes without the user really knowing.

British cars from the 70s maybe. But there is no British mass-market car industry left - the last British manufacturer went out of business years ago, so you don't have anything to worry about.

Incidentally, Audi use Lucas electrical parts (that Lucas, as in Lucas prince of Darkness). So you better cross German cars off your list too.

I don't disagree. I think crimping gets a bad rap because people are used to cheap crimp tools and cheap connectors which do a terrible job (which even un-strain-relieved solder joints will actually outlive). People see that a moderately decent crimp tool will set them back £100, so go for the cheap Chinesium non-ratchet one that costs £6, and the connector fails after 3 months because the wire just falls out the improperly crimped connector, so conclude that crimping is rubbish.

Since the login page is going to come from at least the same organisation (and likely the same server), if it's been compromised then that won't help - it just means the attacker has to do marginally more work adding a bit of code to the stuff sent to the browser to harvest the plain text password there instead.

Serial and parallel doesn't refer to the amount of signals, but how they are clocked. If you took 16 RS-232 ports and split your data into 16 parts and transmitted them, it would still be serial as each port is independently clocked. With a parallel port there's a single clock for all the signals. Every separate signal (there's 4 of them for USB-C super speed) is independently clocked, so it's not a 4 bit parallel link, but 4 separate serial links.

The red blue and yellow crimp connectors are actually very reliable (we use them in aviation) - if:

- you have the proper crimp tool (and a good crimp tool is quite expensive - at least as much as a mid-tier soldering iron), a proper ratchet tool with a properly made die, not the cheap Chinesium things you get for £6 at Halfords
- you don't get the cheap crap crimp connectors (good ones aren't really that expensive either)
- the person crimping them knows how to use the crimp tool - which isn't hard, you can probably teach a chimp to crimp.

Do all that stuff and you have connectors that take 1/10th of the time to install vs. soldering, and there are far fewer things to go wrong.

If the connection has proper strain relief and the cables are properly supported, a soldered joint will outlive the car.

However, crimping is faster and easier and needs a lot less skill to make a good connector. Making a good solder joint and doing all the things to ensure it will last takes a modicum of skill and it also takes time. But you can teach a chimp to crimp. (That's assuming you have the correct crimp tool, and a good one, not a cheap one made from Chinesium).

No, scientists aren't getting constantly "surprised" or even "baffled". These are words journalists are putting in their mouths as a way of making a story more interesting.

Fossil fuels are finite too. (Also "rare Earths" aren't particularly rare despite their name). There are battery technologies that don't use cobalt. There are technologies under development that use sodium which is enormously abundant.

There are other types of battery technology being developed for stationary storage - for mass power storage, you don't have quite the constraints you have for mobile power like an electric car so you can use materials that would not be optimal for use in a car or a mobile phone. Unconstrained by weight, you can use flow batteries (some of which have been developed with tremendous energy densities and very high numbers of charge cycles compared to conventional lithium ion type batteries).

Batteries are a *huge* part of our future of electrical generation. It might take a while before the grid is transformed, but it took a long time for the grid to develop in the first place anyway (how many years of engineering development did it take to arrive at the modern highly efficient combined cycle gas turbine power plant, something that would have been scoffed at in the 1970s?)

Obesity doesn't make your legs longer nor your body taller. Someone so obese that their stomach would touch the seat in front probably doesn't have the mobility to even get tot the airport, let alone in the plane.

The airline easyJet has a load factor of 95% (so nearly all of their flights are totally full). Ryanair is probably similar.