Steel, laminated wood, the occasional concrete pole, and I have seen a few that appear to be fiberglass.

I don’t need to look it up. I was involved in underground electric for 30 years. Horizontal boring is very common.  Ever try trenching across a road, under a RR track, across a river, through a city, etc?

Modern high voltage poles are primarily galvanized steel. 

Those poles last a very long time. 40+ years in the rust belt. They’re heavily galvanized and very thick. (I spent 30 yrs repairing traffic signals . . . . mostly mounted on steel poles.)

Trenching is mid-20th century.  Horizontal directional boring is the preferred method.  Look it up.

Modern underground installations are rarely done with trenching.  Horizontal directional boring has been the industry standard for at least 30 years.  No need to disturb the surface.

You heard wrong. IMO, other than cost, the main obstacle to underground installation is rock. If there’s not enough soil to get the wire deep enough to satisfy code, you need to keep it overhead.

Interesting. I owned a Mercury Mystique (their version of the Contour) for 11 years and 100k miles. A fuel pump under warranty, and an alternator shortly before trading it were the only issues. Mine had the V-6, 5-speed, and wonderful leather seats. Gas mileage wasn’t it’s forte, but winding the little V-6 up to 6500…

It seems to me Toyota was smart to build an under powered prototype, or whatever you wish to call it, in terms of sorting out issues and seeing if it was even worthwhile. Isn’t this more a proof of concept car than one where they needed to worry about the final specs?

Somehow we all managed to get to work, take vacations, and go shopping without electronically controlled all wheel drive with traction control.

The more bolts the better in my opinion.  However, a three legged table is the most stable base there is, since any three points not in line define a plane.

This is why I built an automatic cat feeder several years ago. Two cat capacity, triggered to release a small amount of dry food every 4 hours. It’s like Weight Watchers for mouse eaters.

There are 49 other states, not just California, and what I said is true. I spent 30 years repairing all aspects of traffic signals, including their computers, to the component level. Yes, yellow time is based on speed as you imply, as well as the number of lanes crossed in an intersection by cars travelling in that…

Perhaps the timings were set for 3.5 seconds, but someone felt that 4 was proper. The time selected is based primarily on intersection size and vehicle speed, with more yellow time added for higher speed and more lanes crossed during that time. The 3 seconds is an absolute bare minimum, which I don’t recall seeing…

The minimum yellow time is carved in stone by a device called a conflict monitor, which is a microprocessor based computer that watches everything the traffic signal computer does.  The traffic signal computer software won’t allow any yellow time of under 3 seconds, and neither will the conflict monitor, which will…

I owned three of these in the early 80's, one of which I drove >100k miles in three years. Great fun to drive, but terrifying above 75 mph. A rear sway bar made a huge difference in handling. Manual everything, with nothing to break. These came with a Weber carburetor which never caused a lick of trouble. In base…

I owned an 84 for about a year until the Mrs totalled it. Non-turbo, 5-speed, absolutely superb cloth bucket seats. The shifter was horrible, but the MPG reached high 30's on the highway.  If not for the nasty, cable operated shifter, I would have replaced it with another one.

Big deal. The Interact Home Computer, I owned for several decades before selling it on ebay, was even crappier than your fine Odyssey. It hailed from 1979 and rocked an Intel 8080.

Anyone driving a 440 Hemi was kidding. No kidding, since the 440 wasn’t a Hemi.

My informed delivery is working just fine.