Unfortunately the CAFE regulations that were put in place a decade ago to increase MPG per manufacturer left a gaping hole or exception for “light duty trucks”. Trucks were seen as “working people” vehicles so the car industry discovered they can skirt those regulations by selling consumers large trucks and SUVs under the “light duty truck” class.

Car manufacturer propaganda worked, convinced many family units to upgrade because of perceived “sAfeTy” and “cOmFoRt”. In reality, these things are more dangerous to other people on the road and pedestrians on the streets. I would say 95% of truck and SUV drivers on the road today need to get their license revoked and traded in for mental therapy.

Hybrids came from Toyota, one of the largest incumbents.

The concept of “EVs” is nothing new. Concept was tested and deployed in the late 19th century. [1]. Early “modern” versions built by GM in the mid 1990s [2]. Sure, Tesla did bring back EVs to the mainstream in the late 2000s to early 2010s, but only after a century of human failures to bring it to market.

Waymo is just semi autonomous driving tech. It’s a bit useless in my opinion. But I’m a bit partial to public transportation over transportation via personal vehicle. The “problems” it solves wouldn’t exist if countries (namely the US) would have more diverse transportation options and more efficiently built cities.

Android Auto / Apple CarPlay - are these really considered “innovations”? It’s putting the OS of your favorite phone and loading it into a car head unit. Making sure it connects neatly with the physical components of a car. At the end of the day, it’s an over engineered radio. Incidentally, this probably is what allows car manufacturers to capture all of the private data that happens in “your” vehicle [3]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehi...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

[3] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...