Due to a typo in the paperwork sent to HR by the hiring manager, they are only paying 64,189 pence. The director was last heard chastising HR, saying "It's not your job to be as confused as Nigel."
Any mechanism that can store enough energy to get a car from point A to point B is going to store a nontrivial amount of energy and be subject to some eyebrow-raising failure modes. This applies to gasoline, diesel fuel, batteries, and all flavors of hydrogen.
While that is certainly plausible, I don't think it is inevitable. There have certainly been other points in the history of AI where it looked like exponential growth was about to render everything moot, and then the entire field hit a decade-long plateau.
I'm just a casual observer, but it's not obvious to me that the current set of AI tools and techniques are well-matched to the things that the now-ubiquitous large language models are bad at. (That being said, it's not obvious that they aren't either)
NYC does have a number of dedicated salt-spreader/plow trucks [1].
As for why they use garbage trucks to plow, I speculate that it's an issue of scale. Buying a special purpose plow truck to replace every garbage truck that currently does double duty would leave you with a pretty significant/expensive fleet of trucks that are sitting idle most of the time (not to mention taking up space, which is at a premium in NYC).