I still have my Thomas Guides!

You said "Open Source development." Which in the grand scheme of things is pretty small.

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 think the possible adverse impacts to society would not be outweighed by something that small.

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).

Ehh, I liked Universe a lot, and I never could get into the main Stargate series.

The CIA can't just make arrests on US soil. They actually do need the FBI to do that. That's another form of oversight.

...is to not collect the data in the first place.

There was no way to know it was a grift. Unless of course you saw every other obvious grift he had run on his followers for years before.

"Nothing can be fixed while people continue to believe there's a difference between Team Red and Team Blue when the same people own both Team Red and Team Blue"

Yeah, people have been spouting that off for decades. The funny thing is, whenever Team Red or Team Blue is in charge you see a real difference.

I've also never heard the dorm room philosophers who think both parties are the same ever explain exactly why if the same people own both Team Red and Team Blue why the billionaires spend so much time, money, and energy trying to get Team Red into office. Shouldn't they just relax?

"Musk set up OpenAI as an OPEN SOURCE NON PROFIT because he is paranoid about AI."

OpenAI was set up as a nonprofit by numerous people, stop trying to pull a Tesla and turn Musk into the sole founder.

I mean maybe he's right, but I would always take with a grain of salt a software package creator's opinion on how awesome his software package is.

You'd think an experienced speaker would be able to adapt to the crowd.

What's the appeal on losing money to those with inside information?