Subaru Crosstrek 0-60:

Aluminium is really good in terms of its stiffness per weight because it’s much less dense than steel, so parts can be made thicker, and stiffness is proportional to the cube of the thickness. Which makes it really good for planes (and is also why composites are making such headway in aviation).

Your last two paragraphs do nothing to rebut the fact that aluminium has far more embodied energy and embodied CO2 than steel. That’s the issue - what requires the least energy to produce, and what has the least embodied CO2. And if you’re comparing aluminium and steel, steel wins on both counts, even now. It doesn’t…

I reckon I was paying half of that for two hours a week...

Counterpoint: It’s more commercially-viable than increasing the scale of aluminium production to displace steel in automotive manufacture. Green steel has been costed at approximately a 30 percent premium (at most) over conventional steel…

No denying that.

Turns out we won’t be getting this European car by the look of it though. BOO!

It’s the economically sensible thing to do (interestingly, even hydro-powered aluminium production seems to generate more CO2 per ton of product than steel does on average).

But there’s not enough aluminium already in circulation to make all of our cars from recycled metal. And production of virgin aluminium generates huge amounts of CO2 (average for all aluminium, both virgin and recycled is 11.5 tons per ton of metal and 2-4 tons even when using hydro power, compared to 1.9 tons per ton…

But it really isn’t. The global average for steel is 1.9 tons of CO2 per ton of steel produced:

That is true of conventional steel production. But it’s not a necessary part of the process - hydrogen can be used to reduce iron ore to iron using the HYBRIT process: (https://www.miningmonthly.com/partners/partner-content/1383437/hydrogen-could-hybrit-really-halt-coal-use-in-steel-making)

Frequency-modulated continuous-wave LIDAR looks promising as a sensor technology for AVs:

Unless it’s recycled aluminium, that won't help much. Refining bauxite requires an enormous amount of energy.

Motorcycle racing can be so cruel sometimes. Vale, Jason.

It’s quite different in terms of the fluency you require, isn’t it? And my French definitely was not to the technical level I required to interact with other researchers in a way that was actually useful.

I still plan to learn French (and German), but they're not near the top of my priorities right at the moment. I can see that they would be useful.

I had about six months of once-a-week French, which would have been okay on holiday, I think. But insufficient for the technical work that I was trying to do.

My French would have worked well enough on holiday, but I was trying to do technical work, for which it was unfortunately inadequate.

I think I would have had enough to get by if I was holidaying there. Unfortunately, I did not have enough to get by as a postgraduate researcher.