the vehicles start looking more like a wingless airplane than a car.

And what does the company's name mean? ;) (Hint: it's Greek)

It adds up to 40 miles per day, not 5. 5 would be a cloudy day.

I used to be anti-solar-panels-on-cars back when solar panels were expensive, and ones of reasonable efficiency were even more expensive - the argument was, "put it on your roof where it belongs". But that's just not the case any more. Adding solar is just not that much of a cost to the car. It adds some complexities, but mainly in the design / early manufacturing phase.

Also:

The average American drives 37 miles per day.

1) So if you're in a sunny climate, it covers all of said average-driver's driving. Otherwise, said average-driver has to plug in occasionally, but not nearly as often.

2) Most people drive less than the average (the average is skewed by a long-tail - small numbers of people who drive very far every year). What you actually should be meaning is the median US driver; the median drives 23 miles per day. Most Europeans, even less.

3) Even for said "average american", their daily average is skewed by long drives (e.g. road trips and similar). Wheren of course you're plugging in, you'd be plugging in even if the car was adding 80 miles a day. But when not on road trips, their daily average is lower.

4) Surely you can see the appeal of the tangential benefits, such as being unstrandable - where even if you run out in the middle of the desert 20 miles from the nearest town, you're still going to get there, just delayed (remember that EV ranges, if you drive very slowly, increase like 2x, so 40 miles a day becomes 80, so a 20 mile shortfall is only a ~4h delay on a sunny day).

5) Nobody is saying, "One car for everybody". Of course appeal varies by person and by location. Here in Iceland for example we have three problems. One, very little sun at all for a good chunk of the year. Two, even in the summer, when the days are long, the sun is mainly low and circles around you. Solar power just kinda sucks here in general. And three, the three-wheel config would mean that the centre wheel wouldn't align with tracks in the snow from other cars (although there is a slight advantage, in that it also wouldn't align with road ruts from studded tyres, which often fill with water in the rain and become hazardous).

But somewhere in the southern US, it's a great option.

There was a Sonnax fix for my ZF5HP42A valve body problems too. It didn't work.

Security is not a boolean.

Of all the things I wish I had gotten when my father died, his 1962 Chevy C10 with the 292 and 4 speed is at the absolute top. I would have updated from points to electronic ignition, though.

The ZF 8 has a 150k km planned lifespan and is known for valve body problems causing it to drop into limp mode.

I had enough fun with ZF when I had a ZF5. I don't need 3 more problems than I had with that one.

They have been for decades really, it's just least common in OTR hauling because in that application the manual gearbox still has an efficiency advantage. They are probably most common for construction equipment because the automatic gearbox offers tangible advantages there. There's a promotional video from Allison which is pretty easy to find whose tagline is something like "continuous power" about how the benefits of their transmissions which are able to make shifts under full power, which is true; the heavy ones are full planetary gear designs and they are as convenient and reliable as the day is long. These gearboxes also don't conveniently feature more than six speeds, but on the plus side, Allison tends to give two overdrives on highway use transmissions.

The problem with consumer-level automatic transmissions continues to be reliability. A lot of the modern many-speed automatic transmissions have only a single-gear limp mode which is only suitable for getting them onto a trailer, where older transmissions often used to have two-speed limp mode, and some of the new transmissions cannot limp at all without a functioning TCM. I see that as a big drawback. Belt-driven CVTs are also infamously fragile, yet also dominant in low-end vehicles.

Those time frames are sufficiently different that you really cannot draw any conclusions from them alone, but the writing is clearly on the wall for manual transmissions in Europe as well, they're just a bit behind the curve. ICEVs themselves are going away, and are likely to stop being sold sooner in Europe than the USA, so they may well catch up.

Well, it isn't for a whole lot of reasons. Zeroth, "utopia" means nowhere and it's a thought experiment. First and foremost though, the "I" in "I'm" — utopia is supposed to be a type of society and not just a state of being for a single person. It's working for you now so you are happy now. But you being able to replace all those people now somehow hasn't made you wonder if you are going to be replaced.

Another reason which is (now that I make the comparison) actually equally important is that AI is based on unsustainable resource consumption, which means that it's fundamentally not post-scarcity.

Maybe you should ask an AI what some of these words you're using mean. It seems to be making you dumber already, though, so it would probably be healthier to look them up for yourself instead of asking a LLM and having it tell you that you are a very smart boy.

That's a particularly sad little straw man even for Slashdot.

What we know for sure already is that AI use is correlated with impaired knowledge accumulation and transfer. It's poisoning its own well.

It's not treason unless you do it for the purpose of harming your country or aiding an adversary. This is "only" sharing confidential and potentially classified material out of scope, which is also serious but doesn't call for anyone to be hung by the neck until dead.

For those who didn't follow it, it's not that it's a contact binary that is so neat in and of itself, it's that when they modeled it, they determined that, the collision that formed it was less than 5 meters per second (less than 11 mph / 18 kph). Like a parking lot fender bender, but with the cars being ~750 billion tonnes.

Please look up what 3rd world means.

Data centers need to pay for their own energy increase, be closed cooling systems, and not allow withing 5 miles of a residential area, and residence can't be built within 5 miles of a data center.

A contagion tube that slower and vastly more inconvenient. Plus a bigger polluter.
People pushing for everyone to get on the bus have no clue about buses.