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.

They specifically outlined the trojan horse rationale for denying public contributions. Someone plays the long game by submitting patches and gets privileged access to the project and repository, then turns around and backdoors it on the behalf of a state actor.

Example:

https://www.atlanticcouncil.or...

"The XZ saga began when the original maintainer of XZ Utils was pressured by other contributor accounts into adding user JiaT75 as a maintainer of the project. JiaT75 had been contributing to the XZ Utils community since 2022. A group of accounts and JiaT75 questioned the original maintainerâ(TM)s ability to maintain the XZ Utils project and spent years convincing them to bring JiaT75 on board as an additional maintainer. Once JiaT75 was provided maintainer access, they replaced the original maintainerâ(TM)s contact information with their own on oss-fuzz, a project that scans open source projects for vulnerabilities. After further preparation, they issued commits for XZ Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, implementing the backdoor into the code. This backdoor had the potential to infect Linux operating systems, but thanks to the keen eye and curiosity of a Microsoft engineer, it was discovered before causing widespread harm. "

"Christopher Robinson (he/him/his), Chairperson, OpenSSF Technical Advisory Council; Director of Security Communications, Intel

âoeThe attack itself is not novel; it strings together a series of social engineering/cyber-bullying tactics, and leverages embedding offline malicious files during the CI/CD stage of publication. What is unique is how well the attacker studied and exploited common community behaviors and norms to penetrate the project and take maintainership that could allow the later actions in secret.â "

So I interpret it as closing off one channel for attack, which isn't taking public pull requests, but shutting off public contributions entirely, and limiting the ecosystem to known, trusted entities only.

I suppose as long as they let you fork, someone can always create a derivative that accepts public contributions, and then they can take the risk of dealing with that particular risk.

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.

I can't find the citation for it, but in at least one case, part of the reported allocation of water for datacenters was due to the water consumed during construction. I would consider this kind of consumption legit if called out as a temporary usage of water, but FUD if just assumed as part of the overall calculation of ongoing water demand.

As for creating/destroying water:

https://www.fwpcoa.org/content...

"Air cooling (water-free): Many smaller or older data centers rely on air conditioning and chilled air circulation to remove heat. These use mechanical chillers or heat exchangers and do not consume water for cooling (aside from minimal water for humidification). Air cooling is common in cooler climates or where water is scarce, but it can require more electricity to run compressors or fans.
Evaporative cooling (open-loop): A majority of large, modern data centers use water-based cooling for better energy efficiency. This often involves cooling towers or evaporative chillers: warm water absorbs heat from servers and is then cooled by evaporation in a tower. As water evaporates into the air, it carries away heat â" dramatically cutting the electrical power needed for cooling. The trade-off is high water consumption. Most big data centers today use some form of evaporative cooling because itâ(TM)s energy-efficient, especially in hot climates, but it directly uses water (often drawn from municipal supply).
Closed-loop water cooling: In closed-loop systems, water circulates in sealed pipes or coils that cool the servers without directly exposing water to air. Because the water isnâ(TM)t evaporated to the environment, losses are minimal â" itâ(TM)s mostly the same water recirculating (with some makeup water added occasionally). These systems can include water-cooled heat exchangers or liquid-to-liquid cooling loops. Closed-loop cooling can reduce freshwater use by up to 70% compared to traditional open evaporative methods. The downside is higher cost and complexity, but they are far more water-efficient since water isnâ(TM)t âoeburned offâ into the air."

"However, a growing number of data centers are now shifting to recycled water. Tech giants have begun partnering with utilities to use treated wastewater (effluent) for cooling instead of fresh drinking water. For instance, Google uses reclaimed or non-potable water at over 25% of its data center campuses (one notable example is its Douglas County, Georgia data center, which runs on recycled municipal wastewater). Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced in 2023 that 20 of its data centers are cooling with purified wastewater instead of potable water. After cycling through the cooling system, this water is sent back to the treatment plant to be cleaned and reused again. These initiatives leave more drinking-quality water for the community and exemplify the industryâ(TM)s trend toward âoestrategic water sourcing.â Still, as of today, reclaimed water use is the exception. Most data centers worldwide are still using fresh water for cooling, although this is slowly changing with new projects and local regulations."

So evaporative cooling "destroys" water. And using treated wastewater (pure enough to use for datacenter usage and probably irrigation, but still too ick for some people to drink directly - aka toilet to tap), if part of their investments were to purify even more water than the municipality was already processing, combined with closed loop usage could be considered "creating" water.

Your guess is as good as mine though, it all sounds like marketing hype in an attempt to combat FUD.

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.

Well written code is self-documenting, specifically because once you start putting documentation somewhere else, you start getting a divergence in truth. And I'm not talking about leaving comments in the code - that's also documentation, as anyone who has had to reconcile business processes with code can attest upon discovering that the comments and the code also don't agree with each other. (This is where I try and sell people on having detailed commit messages, and then realize that they're all going to be lost the next time someone advocates for a squash merge...)

Refactoring is how you refresh your knowledge of the code and remove any accumulated cruft. Stuff like "Oh, we meant to do that in the next release, but we've completely removed that functionality, so this stub can go too.", and "Well shit, this algorithm doesn't work the way we thought it did - and the test suite is missing the test that would tell us that it doesn't work for that last 10% of use cases.", and "Uh... this method doesn't only do that one thing anymore, time to refactor and dry things out."

The moment you start relying on "tribal knowledge" to manage your code, you're fucked. Because very soon, as you have turnover (doesn't have to be layoffs - people can get promoted up or sideways, a bunch of people get hired, some people get transferred to special projects and start forgetting the stuff they maintained), the tribal knowledge distills to one thing: "If it isn't broken, don't touch it - you'll break it."

In other words... If your codebase is in decent shape, AI code bots are not a net negative unless people are blindly approving commits. If your codebase is in shitty shape, you're probably already having issues with diverging truth (and inability to scale), and you're fucked either way.

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.

This actually has been a problem for utilities for a long while.

https://freemannews.tulane.edu...

"As more and more homeowners install solar panels, they generate their own electricity and buy less from utility companies. While consumer solar adoption is good for the environment, it reduces the revenue that utilities generate from consumers. To make up for the shortfall, utilities raise electricity prices, which in turn pushes more people to switch to solar, further decreasing demand for utility-provided power. This âoeutility death spiralâ can lead to skyrocketing prices for consumers and financial instability for utility companies."

EVs were supposed to be a lifeline, but that whole push has been sidelined.