Apple has not the size to forego 400 million potential customers. And they can still sell iPhones without Siri in Europe. Hence, the shareholders will pressure Apple management to realize the revenue, even if that means not installing Siri on the devices.

Besides that, many companies operating in both North America and Europe want the same mobile devices on both sides of the pond, to streamline roll-out and control processes for the devices, and if they decided for Apple in the U.S., they will try to strong-arm Apple into selling law-compliant devices in Europe, by threatening to look for alternatives for North America too, so they can avoid doubling their IT structures.

I don't claim any different.

As I have used an EV, I can safely confirm it causes less pain.

The ICE industry seems to be full of lies. Every proponent will tell you internal combustion engine is the best thing in the world, but they won't tell you the pain they go through just to go on a trip. Then they tell you the flying car is coming. Apparently it isn't.

I don't get it. Governments require many things, and most of them are to be bought privately.

I never had any issues handing my children a lighter. None of them became an arsonist, not even an accidental one. Make lighting a lighter the most boring thing to do, and they will use one only to perform some boring task.

⦠which is comically high for the U.S., but not anywhere else. As soon as there is a sizeable market for used EVs, the prices stabilize. Until a year ago, used EVs on offer were either first gen types long superseded, or EVs with extremely high mileage of 150,000 miles or more, which indeed did not sell well. Right now, this changes at least in the E.U., and resale values increase.

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).

With Micro-USB, it was exactly the same, just five years early.

Long before the E.U. legislation went into effect, there were long consultations which standard to adhere too. So tech companies had enough time to read the writing on the wall and move. That was the reason why USB-C was ubiquitous everywhere when the due date came. Apple was struggling for some time, debating the idea, but finally caved with the 16 series.

Your argument is a typical strawman argument. You postulate the idea that the E.U. came up with USB-C as the next standard out of the blue, and then argue that companies were already transitioning when the legislation was finalized. But your postulate is (probably intentionally) wrong.

Not exactly. Personal originally meant "not shared with another person". Originally, it meant a computer only you have access to, only you install and run software, and only you store and retrieve data.

Apparently, you have never installed Nagios. Back in the days, when you ran the install script, it wrote out what it was doing, and then suddenly the lines appeared:

It was the same warning to you to vet any code before executing it.

Pretty high, I would wager. Alcohol and coding don't mix.