Vehicle engineering

La densidad energética decide la autonomía, says one sentence on this page, and la autonomía is where a driver and a political scientist use the same Spanish word. It is how far a vehicle goes on one filling or one charge — English calls that the range and never the autonomy. It is autonomy in the ordinary sense, doing without help. And in Spain it is a place: una comunidad autónoma, and in speech simply la autonomía, one of the seventeen regions. Range, independence and a region, all on one root.