This is one of those problems where the complexity scales by the square of the speed. Double the speed, quadruple the complexity. You not only need to see a human from farther away, you also need to predict their movement longer in advance.
I'm sure there are systems capable of identifying a human from far away, even at night. The hard part is that this problem has very low tolerance for both false positives and false negatives. You don't want your vehicle emergency stopping on its own in the middle of a highway, and I suspect that's the part not ready for prime time yet.
I hate to sound like a "cost benefit analysis", but at some point you have to say "For the amount this risky, unproven gadget will cost, we would save more lives by spending it on boring, unsexy infrastructure projects, disaster preparedness, proven safety upgrades, etc."

As long as you're in the market for a cushy tech-forward luxury sedan, a generic midsize family crossover, or an enormous truck you're spoiled for choice here.
But small cars? You have the Chevrolet Bolt (which has obsolete charging circuitry and was recently discontinued), the Nissan Leaf (which has an obsolete battery thermal management system and should have been discontinued a long time ago) and... well I guess the Tesla Model 3 is technically a midsize sedan which qualifies it for small-car status in America. Pretty much every other small EV on the market here is a low-effort compliance car (Mini, Fiat, the e-golf).

It's sad that so few manufacturers giving small cars their best engineering talent. With Nissan in a race to the bottom, VW and Mini moving upmarket, Hyundai/Kia and Subaru chasing the crossover bandwagon, and every American manufacturer giving up entirely, the only mainstream companies giving small cars their best effort are Honda and Toyota, neither of which are in a hurry to make an EV.

The Chicago freeze was an interesting confluence of events and should be used as a case study in root cause and corrective action. An important thing to note, however, is that almost all the factors that led to the charging failures are fundamentally solvable engineering problems.

1. Manpower: Rideshare companies and the companies leasing vehicles to rideshare drivers were adding financial incentives to EV leases in certain markets, including Chicago. This had two effects:
1.1: Lots of new drivers with no experience on how these vehicles perform in extreme cold, including the increased power consumption and decreased charging rates in cold conditions, and techniques for mitigating those effects.
1.2: Because many rideshare drivers were unable/unwilling to get off-street Level 2 chargers, they have to rely on DC fast chargers in the area more than the typical EV owner.

2. Mother Nature: Chicago's geography and its proximity to Lake Michigan means the shortest road trip distance between any two points is likely to wrap around the lake shore. This has the effect of concentrating the demand for DC fast charging around the shore.
3. Machine: EVs charge slower when cold and use more energy to operate when cold.
4: Method: To mitigate the low temperature charging rates and reduce energy usage on the road, EVs can precondition their batteries and their cabins to their optimal operating temperature either prior to starting a journey or prior to charging. They have battery heaters specifically designed to warm up a frozen battery. But the procedure for doing so often entails setting up a schedule in the vehicle's computer or entering a charging destination into the vehicle's built-in navigation system (not a connected phone). The vehicle will start conditioning when it plugs into a charger, but that will take a while. Drivers who were unable, unwilling, or didn't know how to precondition arrived at a DC fast charger with severely degraded charging performance.

5. Manpower (2): The additional regional trips generated by a long holiday weekend (Martin Luther King Jr. Day) increased demand on DC fast charging.

Chicago's geography combined with the rideshare companies' sudden push for EV leases stretched the DC fast charging infrastructure thin. Lines for chargers along the lake shore were not unusual even on a normal day during peak hours. The extra holiday weekend road trip traffic pushed the network even closer to the breaking point. On top of that, the cold temperatures meant that drivers had to stop to charge more frequently. And when they did, those that didn't precondition for charging had slower than usual charge speeds. Eventually, cars were arriving at DC fast chargers faster than they were leaving, and the system found its breaking point when vehicles ran out of energy while waiting to get a charge. That's why you saw all the stranded vehicles at charging stations, not on the street. The vehicles themselves functioned just fine in the cold; it's charging (and specifically DC fast charging) that was the problem.

The lessons to take away from that incident are these:
1. Infrastructure: Expand DC fast charging stations to handle surges in demand combined with longer charging times. If possible, protect said stations from the wind to make vehicle heating more effective. Expand access to on-street level 1 & 2 charging to give people without off-street parking a place to charge without putting more load on the DC fast charger network. This is an un-sexy and expensive engineering problem, but it's not impossible.
2. Training: Drivers need to understand how cold weather affects their vehicles and how to mitigate these effects. Pretending that cold weather isn't a problem doesn't help. Drivers need to be taught how to plan for increased power draw and how to precondition. This is a learning curve with any new technology, and it is surmountable.
3. Machine design: Systems for preconditioning should be platform agnostic (e.g. should work with the driver's phone navigation, not just the built in navigation system), and manual preconditioning should be easy and intuitive.

Ford CEO Jim Farley seems to think there are some savings to be had by making smaller EVs, but it's yet to be seen if these savings will be passed on to the consumer.
An important consideration is that the current crop of EVs consists almost entirely of cushy luxury sedans, midsize family crossovers, and enormous trucks; and it's not economically sustainable. Legacy auto has had to put money on the hood just to move some of them. It's possible that smaller EVs could be made more profitably, and I hope he's right on that front. But like you said, it may take some reimagining of what a small car looks like to make that possible.

You're going to drive ~4-5 hours with a car full of children without stopping? Battery preconditioning has largely solved the low-temperature charge rate issue, and I think those kids are going to need at least one stop.
More to the point, I think a greater diversity in fuel choices is great. No single thing is going to replace petroleum, it's going to be a combination and synthetic fuels may be a small part of that equation. The question is: how much are you willing to pay per gallon every day for that extra range you use a couple of times per year? If you're being realistic and answer "more than $8/gallon", then that works fine, more power to you. If not, then we're going to have to find something other than synthetic fuels for surface cases.

At the risk of aligning with "perfect" as the greatest enemy of "good enough", I don't see synthetic hydrocarbon fuels being a significant fuel source in the foreseeable future. Just based on the best-case efficiencies of the processes involved, the energy that would be needed to make synthetic fuels could be significantly more effective charging current battery technology.

Even if the engineering miracle of atmospheric carbon capture eventually gets solved and the synthesis process can be scaled up, the most optimistic cost estimate I've seen for a synthetic fuel equivalent to gasoline is $2/liter (~$8/ US gallon). That estimate comes from Porsche e-fuel development, and that's the cost at the refinery, not at the pump. This stuff could be useful in edge cases where hydrocarbon infrastructure exists but electrical infrastructure (for whatever reason) does not, but industry's reluctance to embrace synthetic fuels has more to do with thermodynamics than politics.

Exactly. Diversifying our transportation fuels will make it so that no single strategic commodity has such an outsized impact on the price of everything and bring financial stress on everyone.
Check out Turning Oil Into Salt by Gal Luft and Anne Korin. It was published almost 15 years ago, but they called a lot of things right. If you have a transportation grid that can run on just about any energy source (they give the examples of flex fuels, plug in hybrids, and EVs powered by a diversified grid), no single cartel can control the entire sector, and no single disaster can cause an industry-wide price spike.

Salt used to be the strategic commodity for food preservation. Without it, you starved in the winter, were more vulnerable to crop failure, and couldn't field a large military. Then canning and refrigeration were invented, turning salt into just another commodity. Giving the salt treatment to oil can help address the problems of people sensitive to oil cost, while putting a dent in the climate.

Back in the '90s, Toyota discovered that an owner's perception of a vehicle's reliability was a stronger function of how that vehicle was marketed than how it was built. The Celica, marketed as a performance car, was deemed less reliable than more mass-market vehicles built on essentially the same technology with the same quality controls.

I'm not sure whether this was a result of enthusiast drivers putting more stress on their vehicles or simply having higher confirmation bias through more acute awareness of problems, but supposedly this contributed to the decision to split Toyota's sportier offerings into a new brand: Scion. That way, they could isolate their enthusiast marketing under a new brand without diluting the core company's reputation for reliability. The same effect might be in play here.

The linked articles did not mention any consideration for pedestrians. All the metrics they were trying to optimize for were vehicle-related.
If your machine learning optimizations for vehicles make the intersections worse for pedestrians (and optimizing roads for vehicles usually makes them worse for everyone else), then those pedestrians will opt to take cars, negating the benefits you were trying to achieve. Speeding up traffic a tiny bit might turn a pedestrian into a driver.
Any AI traffic optimization needs to train on data reflecting how people choose their mode of transport, and how a proposed change affects that choice. Then, the model should optimize for *people*, not vehicles. Just don't be surprised if it tells you to close the roads and make people walk or bike in order to fix car traffic.
Remember, if your algorithm gives you an answer you don't like, it's usually because you didn't ask the right question.

So... basically park your car in the moving traffic lane?
That's a textbook example of a strategy that works fine... until everyone does it.
If everyone just had their cars constantly circling, it would generate lots of excess traffic. Then the street is a parking lot and nobody can get anywhere.

Is range anxiety overblown? Yes and no.

I've argued for a long time that the barrier to entry into this product isn't so much *range* anxiety anymore, it's *recharge* anxiety. I don't care that a BEV's range is a little less than a liquid fueled vehicle. I care that when that range runs out, I need to be cognizant of where I am and what I'm doing for the next 8-12 hours (~1 hour if I can find a level 3 charger). My time is valuable to me, and any transit system (public or private) needs to treat it that way for me to consider using it.

That said, there is a limit to how little range I would accept. The first-gen Leafs that could barely do an hour round trip without the hassle of planning in a stop? Just owning one car is a stretch, so unless the Leaf and all its fixed costs (registration, insurance, etc.) were free, that's a hard pass. I don't spec out my car around getting from A to B, even if that's 80% of my trips. Ten years from now when the battery is near its end of life, in mid winter, I want to make it to waypoint C.

Look up "Dan O'Kelly". He was a technical instructor with the BATF, and has been called to testify on how the Gun Control Act of 1968 applies to specific components in cases where the defendant allegedly manufactured or purchased a receiver for a firearm without the requisite permits. He has testified in some cases that no single part that was allegedly purchased or manufactured meets every letter of the legal definition of a receiver. Some modern firearm designs have upper and lower receivers, neither one of which contains all the functions described in law (the hammer, bolt or breechblock, and firing mechanism, and which is usually threaded at its forward position to receive the barrel). He's testified in a case where a machinist was allegedly creating and selling receivers to convicted felons who are not allowed to purchase firearms. Prosecutors made a deal with no time served to prevent the case from forming a precedent.

The BATF has been inconsistent with its enforcement of what is and is not a receiver. I get that. To his credit, Dan O'Kelly seems like he's trying to force some change on this front. Ideally that change will take the form of legislation to bring the letter of the law up to date with how modern receivers are made, not a Justice Department rule trying to accomplish the same thing. People are manufacturing and selling receivers to individuals who should not have them, and they're getting away with it due to a technicality in how law applies to technology. That's the "ghost gun loophole".

While occasional formatting inconsistencies when editing Word files can be problematic, the main thing that prevents me from using LibreOffice is the absence of a final view mode with markup when tracked changes are turned on. This has been a feature request for ages, submitted by numerous people. Apple managed to implement it in Pages, so I'm not sure why LibreOffice hasn't been able to after 10 years.

I'm surprised I didn't see Privoxy mentioned in the comments. It may not be as effective or updated as regularly as many browser plugins, but it's the only way to block ads across your entire network, on ANY device. This is one of the reasons I never encounter ads in iOS apps/games with iAds. I've been using it since the days of Internet Junkbuster, before ad-blocking plugins even existed. Aside from blocking ads, Privoxy has some other privacy enhancing features as well.

The first browser that allowed PDFs to be displayed inline without a plugin was Safari since its beta stages. That's because OS X has had the ability to display PDFs built in to it since its Nextstep days. So, it all stems from a desire to duplicate a feature in Safari that was actually a native feature of OS X . . .