However, when figuring out TCO, especially if one is planning to own the vehicle for a decade or more, even depreciation is going to have to be an estimate.

EV depreciation is heavy right now, but is that going to remain steady, go up, or go down? How will it affect your current model?

I can count the number of times I have bought something other than gasoline at a gas station in the last decade on one hand.

There is a reason why I propose installing DCFC stations at restaurants by preference. Though some gas stations blur the line.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

TCO is kind of an individual calculation that involves unknown variables though.

Logically speaking, while it may be true in the average case that TCO for EVs remains higher than not, decreasing EV prices and increasing fuel costs, not to mention increasing prices for ICE vehicles themselves, means that as the gap narrows in the average case, more and more unusual cases pass that line.
IE people with access to cheaper than normal electricity, people who have unusual distances to gas stations or rate visiting one more negatively, those that have easy home charging, with longer driving distances that are still within EV range and predictable, etc...

That said, do you have a citation on that TCO for EVs is still higher?

EV vs ICE Total Cost of Ownership Calculator 5-Year - $42k EV vs $32k ICE, 13k annual miles, all default otherwise - EV $9,811 cheaper. Eliminate the fed EV credit and bump gas to $4/gallon, still $3,543 cheaper.
https://oxmaint.com/industries...
40 diesel vans replaced with EV versions, saved $740k in one year. A different operation found it cost them $280k, but that was because they implemented it differently - charging infrastructure, utility rate, maintenance, and route profiles were substantially different.
This was in 2022, things are a bit different in 2026.

TLDR? As EVs get cheaper and gasoline prices go up, more people will tend to choose EVs.

Lithium extraction in like half the world, actually.
But despite both being salt water, the mineral waters from the wells have a lot more lithium than salt water.

If you wash away the salt deposits, that implies using water and thus generating brine. Brushing the salt away might be better. Main thing would be avoiding losing the salt to precipitation, as the idea seems to be to avoid it returning to the ocean.
Figuring out how to economically purify the salts, including separating out the lithium, would be a neat trick.

I remember reading about the fight between polished aluminum planes and painted. The paint adds weight, and thus increases fuel consumption, but the paint lowers maintenance costs.
A dirty airplane can absolutely burn a noticeably larger amount of fuel.
A car is operating at much lower speeds, generally, so the effect is probably much less.

I'm surprised at appealing. That will likely cost more than the fine.
Still, not wanting the precedent is a thing.

NASA contracts out missions, they don't really do missions in-house. SpaceX is currently winning the launch and visit ISS missions by a mile. Competition like Boeing is more expensive and less reliable.

$500 hammer was actually a set of hammer, shovel, and pick. It had to be non-magnetic, non-sparking, yet durable enough for work. Intended use was for digging out old unstable explosives that the government had let sit around for far too long after WWII.

Pencil that could write in space - standard pencils use graphite, and shed graphite dust when used. Graphite is carbon, it is both conductive and flammable as a powder. Can one see why that might be bad in zero g constrained atmospheres?
The Fisher space pen was developed by Fisher, on his dime, and subsequently sold to both space agencies, US and Russia.

The USA is not "literally Russia". There might be the occasional commonality, but the problems Russia faces are far more severe and deeply run.

That's a little over-simplified. The Chinese aren't trying to compete. BYD has, and continues to lose, a metric shit-ton of money. If the Chinese would, you know attempt to compete fairly then you might be on to something but as it stands now they aren't. https://electrek.co/2024/04/12...

Weekend fun car would be the summer car.
Remember, the winter car is used for dirty tasks even in the summer.

So then you support laws that empower unions to do more than just fund leadership's politics?

That just means our security was good. You little anecdote isn't actual data.