Electric cars allow carbon emissions from personal transport to fall in step with the carbon emissions from energy generation.
Every solar panel, wind turbine, hydro plant, nuclear plant etc which comes online makes all EVs a bit cleaner, but does very little for internal combustion engine cars (acronyming that feels weird now)
Ideally we would have fewer or no cars, but I get that I’m very lucky to live in a major metropolitan area with good public transport and that’s why I don’t need a car, but that’s not true for everyone.
It is significantly easier to move people from combustion to electric cars than it would be to build robust public transport everywhere and change the habits of everyone in the country.
I think it’s counter productive to shame people for taking a positive step for the environment just because it’s not a total solution. People doing good should be praised not shamed, even if it’s a small good, especially if it’s a small good that might lead to them making further positive changes.
Also, the “more cars” on the photo (or even the “just as many cars” thing) doesn’t necessarily mean worse (or better): Solely focusing on actively generated pollution, I would pick 3 EVs over 1 intcomb car. Adding the pollution caused by manufacturing them and their batteries definitely changes the equation, and I’m not an expert enough to say which is better or worse, but the posted image just focuses a bit too much on the sheer numbers of vehicles.
I live a bit Southeast of Atlanta. My job is a 44 mile drive away in Woodstock. My job that I barely managed to get after a year of no serious bites.
I try to WFH as much as I can but they want us in office at least 2 weeks of the month, plus monthly all hands meetings.
I do try to use my ebike to purchase groceries, but recently the back is flat and perhaps I’m just not well inclined for it but I’ve had issues trying to get the wheel off to fix it, and I really can’t afford taking it somewhere for someone to do it for me.
I try not to use house heating in winter, and my car is electric(and old, only 8%-20% when i arrive at work). While I absolutely crave having reasonable public transportation (I enjoyed NYCs when I visited) and would take it in a heartbeat, since i could just read in my hour drive to work and hour and a half back from work, shaming me for not biking 44 miles yo work isn’t going to help that be a reality.
The back wheel on my ebike is also a pain to get off. I found the trick was to use an adjustable wrench to wiggle the axle loose. And again to wiggle it back into place when reinstalling.
electric cars are also dirty to manufacture, which is where everything pollutes the most.
and going by today’s trends, you can bet they are gonna make them more and more fragile and obtuse to repair, whether or not they are electric.
¿Por que no los dos?
The best transportation system is a mixed transportation system, though I agree cars should only make up a tiny fraction of it.
The best transportation system is a mixed transportation system
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Just doesn’t seem practical
Minimizing railroad crossings is absolutely something that should be taken into account while designing transportation infrastructure, but the existence of railroad crossings doesn’t make a transportation network impractical.
You can’t park there, mate!
For people living in cities having a car might be an option. For people living in small town is an obligation. Where I live there are only 2 buses each day: one at 7:00 and one at 14:00. And that’s all.
I live in a town of 5000. It’s a tourist town and has relatively good bus connections as well as a train line.
But if I want to go literally anywhere the buses are usually every 1.5h (more often directly to the capital but that one is either a 2h bus ride or goes there directly without inbetween stops) and the trains are every 2.5h.
Let’s say I need to go to the hardware store. I can take the bus leaving in 40mins, walk 15 mins to the store, 15 mins back and then wait another 30-40 mins for the bus back.
Or I can take the train 10mins to a completely different town, switch trains (hopefully I got the one that has a connection on the other line) and take another 10 mins to the same spot the bus would drop me off. Then repeat the 30+min of going to the store and back. Take the train back to the other town. Hopefully catch the train on the line back home (or wait 2-3 hr for the next one).
Both the train and bus stations are about 10-15min walk from where I live. But any of those options take me at least 1hr of just commuting in best case scenario (no waiting or minimal waiting for bus/train).
Or I can take a car, get to the store in 10min find whatever I need and be back home in 30min from when I left.
Try 1000 people in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah I am not trying to detract from your experience. Just saying that even in cases where public transport is a bit better it still makes sense to have a car. If I lived in the capital I could get pretty much anywhere just using the buses and that would be fine. But outside the capital it just does not work
For people living in small town is an obligation.
Broadly speaking, sure. But most people live in cities. The idea that we need an eight lane highway to accommodate the handful of people coming in from the desolate sand wastes of Bumblefuck, Nowhere is absurd.
The bulk of city traffic is city residents traveling between points in the city. They’re your priority. They’re the ones creating all the traffic
For people living in small town is an obligation
Car culture is actually making it an obligation.
This is highly variable depending on your country, area, town. I have lived car free all my life in Canada, in some small towns, and moved to a big city. It’s entirely possible to live in a small town without a car depending on what you do and the size of the town, even with deficient public transit.
Most people live in urbanized areas and towns are just clusters of houses and people that could be served by transit. According to statista, more than 80% of Canada’s population lives in an urban area. In fact, some of those towns were even created by transit, or already had transit, and now cars are an “obligation”.
And if we are to compare with old numbers from 2012 for commuting distances in Canada, most people will drive less than 10-15 km to go to work, with the vast majority being less than 10 km. So the vast majority seems to gravitate within their town or urban cluster. The “obligation” is mostly made up by car culture, and people will happily defend it so they can justify having their own car. Nobody will be demanding transit and it will die.
There is however a spike for people commuting more than 30 km. And those can have a real obligation to use a car. They should switch to electric when it’s going to be possible. Nobody wants to force them to give up their car, but they are in the minority, meaning cities, and even towns, should not be choking with cars.
In fact, nobody wants to force anybody to give up their car if they truly think it’s an obligation. Just be aware that electric cars will obviously not solve congestion issues, will continue to pollute in certain other ways, will still be deadly, and are not an easy works for all fix.
Everyone benefits from having less cars on the roads and them being electric will not achieve that goal. It’s not because a minority of people want or really need a car, that we can justify building whole towns, cities, and infrastructure for those cars.
I still find it remarkable that we have convinced everyone that we need self driving electric cars … when a bus or train does the same
Come to Slovenia, they do the same, just only once or twice per day 🙄
The problem of our terrain being hills and shit.
Also…
It sucks even when there are no hills 😅
Yeah because people live in those hills and need to get to where the transport is. The transport then is shit because nobody uses it since nobody lives close enough to use it. Shit situation anyway.
But you see, it’s not buses or trains that do the same, it’s limousines. It’s the air of exclusivity that the self-driving car-manufacturers sell, people like to feel special and don’t want to spend time with the riffraff, even if it means they themselves become serfs to the technology companies.
The first thing we see when opening that link is literally bicycles.
If we need self driving cars to help with the last mile issue, I’m pretty sure people will tend to use them for more tha the last mile and ditch other options.
Fuck cars. They are dangerous lethal heavy machines that should not be in urbanized environments.
Considering this is “Fuck Cars” some people here are really carbrained.
Bikes and feet for last mile transit. A car is completely unnecessary for that.
I find it funny when people spend more time searching for their car and finding parking than it would have taken to use a bus
I disagree with the picture of hydrogen cars.
There is no way you could build enough infrastructure to drive that many cars. Hydrogen is so much less energy dense that you would need 20 hydrogen tankers to match 1 gasoline tanker.Actually… If we all shift to hydrogen cars, then everyone will drive less because they’ll all be waiting for fuel. I see this as a complete win!
Also, IIRC, having Hydrogen as a main fuel source would be pretty expensive in most places, as it would need to be produced in factory with high safety standards, and there is little demand for hydrogen, so these factories would live and duebwith the hydrogen car’s useage. There are a few places where it’s actually feasible because there are some factories that produce it, as a byproduct with otherwise little demand, so it’s effectively treated as waste.
Hydrogen is a gas, you can use pipes to transport it. My city is currently building out hydrogen pipes for industrial users. It’s a little annoying because they put the pipes under the bike lanes and the bike lanes aren’t useable during construction.
But energy density is still an issue for cars. The hydrogen needs to be compressed down to a liquid for a car to have a decent range. But compressing hydrogen costs energy. Plus the fact that making hydrogen costs more energy than the produced hydrogen can give back. You might as well use that energy to charge a battery EV instead and waste less energy.
Hydrogen for industrial use makes sense for personal vehicles not so much.
Yeah, but hydrogen cars exist, I’m not defending them, just saying that you don’t need trucks hauling the hydrogen around.
Now that average new car price is over $50K, you’re going to see a lot fewer new cars being sold, and a lot more used cars in demand.
If nothing else, cars are becoming a viable housing option. Or at least they want us to believe that.
The World really is becoming a sucky place.
Why not newer AND fewer. We can multi-task
Electric cars also cause significantly more tire degradation which is one of the most significant sources of airborne microplastics
But air quality in towns with electric cars have cleaner air, whcih could reduce cancer
Yeah air quality mostly increases but what doesn’t increase and actually gets worse are microplastics
We don’t measure microplastics when sources talk about air quality and pollution
So solution is… make tyres out of new materials
Not really simple or easy
Tires are actually kind of an advanced technology and inventing an alternative that is less polluting but somehow equally durable and good at moving and stopping cars is not trivial
But yes we will need new tire material eventually or new technologies entirely like magnetic repulsion cars or whatnot
Yes, cleaner air is a positive aspect and it’s not insignifiant.
But cars also increase sedentarity causing higher cardiovascular disease and obesity risk for its users.
Electric cars also emit as much noise as internal combustion engines when on freeways, causing health and stress issues for poor people living near them in major cities.
And as a city dweller, I can tell you that electric cars are also noisy at low speed because of the fake engine noise they add. I live on the 7th floor and can hear some electric cars better than gas ones when my windows are open. Some sound like they are always honking at low volume.
Yes, they’re better and will help getting cleaner air, but there’s many other negative aspects to using cars that also can’t be dismissed just because they will be electric.
lightweight low speed small electric cars in cities are an absolute win
heavy high speed (= more tire wear) electric cars is just more consumerist slop
Full-size cars, yes, but I wish we the people now stopped the fossil-lobbied lawfare against microcars.
Renault Twizy, top speed 80km/h
Kyburz Plus, top speed 30km/h
- Gross weight ~10% of a typical electric car, so probably ~10% tyre dust too.
- For bikeways. If the plastic surface were designed to yield in a crash, a pedestrian could be safer hit by this than by a bare biker on a bare metal bike.
- Takes less space than a biker because a 4-wheeler can be steered more accurately than a naturally unstable bike needing wobble margins.
- Banned in many places through lawfare: https://xfwnofqagsnmdxuf.quora.com/Lawfare-against-tiny-cars-velomobiles
Less healthy than a bicyclist though, but better than a car.
Yes and tire dust already makes up 78% of the microplastics in the ocean.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds
They are marginally better than internal combustion engines and that’s their only merit. If you’re gonna have a car, it should be electric.
But yeah, electric cars are not only creating micro plastic pollution from tire shedding, they are also heavier and thus require more energy to move, as well as create more potholes.
Plus, they still require parking lots that worsens flooding and creates heat islands.
Worldwide, cars are also killing billions of animals every year, as well as around 2 million humans. Every 30 seconds someone dies injured by a car.
Making them electric will barely change anything.
they are also heavier and thus require more energy to move
No, electric motors are a lot more efficient, 90%+. Internal combustion are at 30% something. So EV, while about 10% heavier, are much more energy efficient. They just carry less energy.
Any more info on that? I found this but it’s coming from an EV enthusiast site and I’d like other sources.
If true I’ll have to retire this argument and focus only on the other half a dozen issues with cars, like using energy to move a multi ton vehicle and park it everywhere a few billion humans go.
Doing the math, an electric car uses 15 to 20 kWh/100 km.
Gasoline car uses about 7 liter/100 km. That’s about 68 kWh.
That seems pretty straightforward with real-world numbers.
Renault Clio I -> 900 kg
Renault Clio VI -> 1200 kg
Both gasoline.
But now the same weight increase is a problem, right?
Yes. Fuck cars. Electric or not.
The car industries can survive by shifting entirely to train production instead. Why not do that?
Not like railways upgrade or buy their trains nearly as often or nearly in the same numbers as people buy cars.
🏍️🛵
They aren’t invented to save anything. They are invented to move you from one place to another. Why would we expect them to save the world?
That’s right! It’s not worth doing anything at all because it isn’t perfect and nothing can ever be incrementally improved.
Thats not what’s being said… but an inordinate amount t of time and energy is being spent on the least impactful option. That is a problem.
I would buy (or fund) a train if I could, but an electric car is the best I can afford. If I have to drive anyway, I should at least make it electric.
I’m very disappointed that I can’t catch a train across Australia on the tracks that already exist.
There is one train from Melbourne to Adelaide, but it doesn’t connect with public transport, only runs on some days, is slower than driving, and more expensive than flying.
Surely it couldn’t be that hard to just run a cheap commuter train on the existing tracks. A sleeper train would be perfect for that distance too.
It’s worth doing P/T.
![[meme] cars are cars](https://quokk.au/static/media/posts/ob/D5/obD5URHl11jEPnd.jpeg){kind=link}
