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).

"""Nobody was aware that you can recreate audio from a picture," a spokesperson for the board said. " """ - OUCH! Doesn't instill much confidence in their competence. Should be bleedingly obvious that the image of a spectrogram has got all the information needed ...

How can you "forget how to code"? That's like forgetting how to tie your shoes or ride a bike - I can't imagine it happening to anyone.

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

But I can't pay those actors to be in my super-niche-but-interesting-to-me movie. I can definitely have AI do it, though.

The manufacturers aren't the problem. They aren't the ones who make the rules about how their product is used on public thoroughfares.

The context of that phrase is almost always used for people who invite regulation with their own foolish/dangerous behavior.

At least this time you presented something more nuanced than "people can't afford housing because they spend too much on other things". You could have led with that.

Also, I live about as far from California as is geographically possible within the lower 48, so I'm not assuming any blame for what happens there.

What makes you think it's rich people who are doing the hiring?

Pretending that the cost of housing is a problem only for people who refuse to live within their means is certainly one way to show why resentment of the rich is near an all-time high.

Why would anyone want to work for a company that does stuff like this??

This looks like the latest escalation in the tug-o-war between employers and remote workers. The relatively few people going to extraordinary efforts just to avoid doing the job they're being paid to do is going to ruin it for everyone else. Do you want to make return-to-office mandatory? Because creating AI fakes to pretend to be on work meetings sounds like a good way to make that happen.