luminiferous

Edit: looks like "american sauce" can refer to a multitude of things. Typically it seems to either be some kind of ranch or thousand island.[1] Both of which are separate from "Sauce Americaine", from French cuisine.[2]

2nd edit: If the OP is talking specifically about Heinz brand "American Sauce", apparently the closest match in American cuisine is either thousand island or big mac sauce/"secret sauce" used on burgers (which is based on thousand island). It is pretty American, come to think of it.

Estimates of solar panel weight I found say that solar panels tend to weigh 2-4 lb per sqft.[1] Note that estimate is for roof-mounted solar panels, but if anything, car-based solar panels should be lighter.

A Prius has dimensions of 180"x69".[2] The sqft of the solar panels will be less than that, since the panels don't cover the windshield, and they don't go all the way to the edge of the hood, etc. That's 86.25 sqft, so that puts an upper bound on the weight of the solar panels at 345 lb. If we assume the lighter end of the scale for solar panel weight, that becomes 172.5 lb. That's 6-11% of the curb weight of a Prius. That's pretty substantial! For reference, a 50 lb spare tire kit can reduce fuel economy (and presumably mileage, for EVs) by 1%.[3]

Although that does imply that you're breaking even if the solar panels can increase your range by ~5%, not accounting for the weight. If you live somewhere like Arizona, that might work out. If you live in Seattle, maybe not.

"Miller and Valasek’s full arsenal includes functions that at lower speeds fully kill the engine, abruptly engage the brakes, or disable them altogether. The most disturbing maneuver came when they cut the Jeep's brakes, leaving me frantically pumping the pedal as the 2-ton SUV slid uncontrollably into a ditch. The researchers say they're working on perfecting their steering control—for now they can only hijack the wheel when the Jeep is in reverse. Their hack enables surveillance too: They can track a targeted Jeep's GPS coordinates, measure its speed, and even drop pins on a map to trace its route."[1]

The wheel control only working in reverse kind of makes sense. They're probably using some kind of self-park feature to control the wheel, and some engineer (sensibly) put in some kind of interlock to prevent the wheel from moving on its own when travelling at speed.

The wording of the article implies that these particular attacks only work when the car is travelling at low speed, but earlier in the article they did mention that they could (and did!) throw the transmission into neutral while the Jeep was driving on the highway. The driver was unable to recover without turning the car off and back on again.

In a followup a year later, they showed that they were able to do these attacks at any speed, including turning the steering wheel.[2]

Isn't that also called a skip? The wiki page for trash skips says that the term is more of a British/Australian/New Zealand english thing[1], but I've definitely heard people call them skips in the US.