You'd think they would be useful in snow, but my 2025 BRZ's traction control will reduce power to the point that the car stalls out instead of letting the damn wheels spin in 2nd gear so I can make it up a snowy hill. (Thank God the car has track mode which disables all the nanny devices, but still, most cars don't have that mode).

I say this with the utmost respect. If you think that having to care about what gear you are in is too much for an already 'dynamic environment', for everyone's safety, especially your own, PLEASE stop driving.

You are at the edge of being overwhelmed as it is with your automatic vehicle by your own admission, any extra things you need to focus on, like the state of your engine's load, the gear you are in, and forecasting if you might need to downshift or upshift is a distraction, and not a feeling of being in control?

Either you haven't driven a manual car, or you haven't seen a good driver operate a manual transmission. There is no distraction from the road. The driver is literally in FULL control of the car without taking their eyes off the road. An automatic cannot tell you're about to take a right turn, it won't downshift and hold the gear throughout the turn, it will absolutely decide that engine load is low and upshift for fuel efficiency destabilizing the balance of the car for example. The solution, they added traction and stability control to compensate. You are not in full control of your vehicle if you're driving an automatic. Don't take my word for it, you have all the proof in your own experiences. Does your car stop accelerating the instant you let go of the gas pedal or does it keep accelearting for a moment, even though you've let up on the accelerator completely? That doesn't happen with a manual transmission.

But genuinely, if you feel having to take in any extra information while driving is a distraction, please reconsider continuing to get behind the wheel.

2: Safety features and self driving. Lane assist (for the most part), traffic jam assist, and park assist are all highly requested features that come to mind that simply cannot be offered with a manual transmission. Self drive is right out. Even emergency braking would be considerably tougher with a manual.

Sorry, you're quite wrong on that one. I also am in Canada and drive a Subaru, mine is a stick shift and a sports car, and it's riddled with this safety/nanny system crap. Automatic emergency braking? Yup! It'll stall the car when it activates unless you have lighting fast reflexes and manage to depress the clutch nearly instantly. Lane Keep assist? Yup. Adaptive cruise control? Yup! And if you're not paying attention and fail to downshift as it slows down, it'll happily stall the car for you, automatically. Also, traction control? You better believe that if you're trying to start the car in 2nd gear to get out of a bit of snow, the traction control system will cut engine power so much it'll auto-stall your car for you.

So yeah, safety features are jammed/shoved into the manual cars as well. But they are idiotic and wouldn't be needed if people actually drove their car instead of sat in the car pressing the gas pedal while doom scrolling on their phones. It's almost like having to shift gears, and pay attention to the car's behaviour and revs, traction, etc. keeps most people off their phones when driving stick. (Sadly I say most as I have seen the incredible lengths to which some idiots go to in order to use their phone while driving a stick shift.)

Studio 5000
TIA Portal
ACADE
TwinCAT / CODESYS
Office 365 / Onedrive
Zscaler private access vpn
etc.

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

So you're saying the US has been Marxist from the very beginning and never stopped?
Huh. You must use a different definition of Marxist.

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).

..."Okay. We've got a bipolar topic here I see"
No. There is no bi-polarity. And the people booing you are not mentally ill.
The students hate that you think it's the greatest new thing.
And they love the time it did not exist.

To use a much overused term where it's actually appropriate:
When you try to convince people their view is invalid and they are mentally ill (bipolar), you are not merely disagreeing with them; you are gaslighting them.

people. Just spray a little Ubik on it and it'll be all better.

Mythbusters did an experiment to disprove this. I'd say they are about as credible as these researchers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

At a large US auto manufacturer our crew were responsible for commissioning controls systems and maintaining the drawings related thereto.
The HDDs on the CAD machines were simply NOT big enough to contain all the drawings so we had stacks of ZIP disks and both mobile (SCSI by parallel port) and internal (SCSI) readers for them.
One of the more experienced guys bought a CD burner (that was a $600.00 purchase at the time) and would make weekly backups for us. Blank CDs were $10.00 apiece at the time.
A couple of years into it we started hearing the "click of death". Thank you Butch; you saved our work!

To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Forgot to add: if you enable IPv6, be sure to use the browser extension IPvFoo. It shows a small 4 or 6 in your URI bar to let you know what protocol you're connecting to. Once enabled, you'll see just how much stuff out there actually is IPv6.