Yes. Each team gets exactly three bananas to drop in "banana mode" for each race. However, banana mode can only be activated if the car is at least 2.17 seconds ahead of the nearest trailing car, unless that trailing car is outside an 18 degree cone whose vertex is at the nose of the lead car. Banana mode cannot be used if a driver has more than 16.5 MJ of energy in the liquid fuel tank, or less than 3.27 MJ of energy in the hybrid battery, nor can it be used if there are less than 37.3km of travel on the current set of tires. Both the lead and trailing car must have a velocity of at least 82.3m/s for banana mode to be active. At most one banana can be dropped between any two pit stops.

Many U.S. states have "right-to-charge" laws, but they only apply if you have a private parking space, not street parking. Choosing an apartment with a private parking space is a good idea anyway.

Most normal apartment competexes I've ever seen in the US do NOT have private or assigned parking spots....they are all big parking lots with first come, first serve....

On long trips abroad, EVs need to charge about three times more often, but you just plug in, go to the restroom or restaurant, and then unplug. With a petrol car, you stand at a smelly pump for five-plus minutes filling the tank, and then stand in a queue to pay

I"m guessing you're not familiar with how it works in the US.

I can't rambler last time (decades ago) that I paid for gas inside....everyone pays at the pump with a credit card.

And on a long trip....or say a mildly long trip of 400 or so miles. I stop half way for about 5-10 minutes total to gas up and hit the restroom.

Most of the time that is my ONLY stop....I want to get to my destination I'm not out to hang out at truck stops, pee, leisurely eat or drink while recharging a car....

At most I might pull off and pee one other time on that trip but that's only 5 minutes max.....

I've never met people like you EV'ers that seem to just stop 4 or so times on a trip and spend 30-45 minutes to lounge around, rest, eat, refuel....when I'm on the road...I'm trying to make the BEST time I possibly can at all times.....I'm all about the destination, not the journey....

Indeed. Replacing half a century of collective experience with a new language in an entirely different and far less tested environment to write low level code, where all the memory safety features have to be disabled at all the same failure points where C and assembly have been used... for reasons.

So, in other words, it really isn't any better at bare metal development than C/C++. If you have to direct memory and hardware manipulation in unsafe blocks, then really, it's just the same thing as doing it in C.

You do not appear to understand what a republic or a democracy is, so I'll ignore the last sentence.

"Independent" does not mean unaccountable to the people. The President is independent of Congress, and vice versa, but both are accountable to the people. Well, the current president doesn't seem to think so, but legally he is.

The civil service is not a part of the executive but is a co-equal branch.

You are correct. In principle, presidents have no authority whatsoever to dictate how an agency runs. The executive branch should have zero authority over the civil service, which is intended to constitute a fourth co-equal branch of government.

In the US, in principle, the status of the civil service as co-equal to, and independent of, the executive should be added to the Constitution and enshrined in law for good measure. Not that that would help much with the current SCOTUS, but a Constitutional change might possibly persuade the current government that absolute authoritatian control is not as popular as Trump thinks.

That is the idea that, in Britain, entities like the NHS and the BBC have operated under. Charters specify the responsibilties and duties, and guarantee the funding needed to provide these, but the organisation is (supposed) to carry these out wholly independently of the government of the day.

It actually worked quite well for some time, but has been under increasing pressure and subject to increasing government sabotage over the past 20-25 years.

It's also the idea behind science/engineering research funding bodies the world over. These should direct funding for grant proposals not on political whim or popularity but on the basis of what is actually needed. Again, though, it does get sabotaged a fair bit.

Exactly how you'd mitigate this is unclear, many governments have - after all - the leading talent in manipulation, corruption, and kickbacks. But presumably, strategies can be devised to weaken political influence.

Democrats can't resist fucking up everything they touch. It's like they want the economy to completely cease to function so that we have to rely on their big government socialism to survive.

I rarely use semicolons; decades ago my teachers always used a red pen to replace them with a period and capitalize the next word. I eventually just gave up and complied with their grammar regime.

The best numbers I've been able to find put that number at about 25% of car owners

In the US, I thought I'd seen the number being closer to fully 1/3 of the population that did not have offstreet private parking where they could recharge every day....

I'm not in favor of the govt intervening....I'm ok with them maybe helping to get charging infrastructure going a bit more, but I don't want taxes or incentives on EV or ICE....let the market work that out. When the EVs are truly beating out the ICE vehicles.....the public will switch....if they don't, then they don't...but the govt shouldn't be choosing winners and losers here.

As far as I can tell claims like yours are just another right wing myth used to demonize immigrant populations they don't like with as much supporting evidence as Trump's fake immigrant crime wave. Maybe a few anecdotes with no broad supporting trends.

All I can say is that I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I don't like the idea of children growing up in America and as citizens who aren't allowed to learn the dominant language.

Before leaving the charger, you can see your next charging stop and the expected arrival SoC (state of charge). Only an idiot would leave a charger without having enough battery. You can also choose to charge more and skip the next charger - for example, if youÃ(TM)re stopping for lunch.

Sounds like a pain in the ass to me.

With my normal car (ICE), I don't have to 'plan' my trip based on where I have to fuel up....with the few exceptions of extremity, like crossing a few desert areas in the US, but for the majority of the US....there's a gas station on every corner in a city and all long the highways....you don't have to know where...they're just there whenever you need them.

And...gas is getting so cheap again too.....

Last time I used one of those apps to find chargers in my area....I found precious few for the whole city area that were public.....

I've only seen a few in a Whole Foods parking lot, and I think there were some in a Winn-Dixie parking lot.

But the few the apps showed were mostly private chargers.

so, living here if you can't charge at home, you're pretty screwed.....EV is just not the way to go around here in the New Orleans area.