In my city public transport is free, anyone can get anywhere else via train or bus cheaper than via car, there is even bicycle dedicated road that goes trough city and connects dozens of neighboring towns and cities but I admit that car is just so much more convinient to use. It’s all about comfort or fear of loosing one, rether than it would be impossible to give people alternative to use.
Bikes are better than cars in snow, however. A fat bike’s tires ‘float’ across the surface of the snow, like snowshoes, and can handle any snow depth. Regular mountain bikes and commuter bikes with knobby tires handle a few inches of snow quite well, because the knobs capture snow between them, and snow sticks to snow. Cars, on the other hand, need a vast expenditure of effort to plow the snow off the road surface, so they don’t slide around in a few inches of snow, or get stuck in deeper snow.
You live in a place designed around cars, that’s the problem. Society worked fine without cars for a good long while. We could have adopted trains, bikes, and buses without the car and things would be going swimmingly. The idea is to fix our bad town planning so that it’s reasonable to get to any destination using any mode if transportation.
I partially agree but you forget that every country = its people and people can either not give a crap or start complaining. Politics are same everywhere, they want to secure their position, so they will follow those who are heard. Otherwise they will follow their own interests.
It’s not as easy as people complaining, though. What are people going to do? Move to a city in 2500KM away in the next province over, because that province has slightly better infrastructure?
No, they’ll complain, nothing will be done, and they’ll stay where they are because they have friends, family, and a job here.
I understand that it’s easier to do in a lot of European countries, but I can literally drive for over 25 straight hours, and still be in my province in Canada. It’s nearly impossible to do any kind of proper public transit, and it’s not feasible to move over it.
The way you put it is misleading. If you want a change, you have to act to be heard. If you get enough people to be heard, things will start to change. Also historically AFAIK Canada had car alternatives, but people like you decided not to use them. So there was no incentive to keep them.
Canada really stifled its non-car mobility when it basically cut all intercity rail service after WWII though, especially for the interior and west coast. We used to have a pretty good train network for getting between nearby cities like Calgary and Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, Kelowna and Vancouver, and even Victoria and Nanimo. We don’t even have a proper Vancouver to Abbotsford commuter rail despite them being right next to each other. There were obviously even longer routes like Toronto to Vancouver but that can’t really compete with planes so no real surprise they went (I don’t count that one Via Rail tourist service as a proper Vancouver-Toronto line). Pretty much the only remaining part of Canada with decent intercity rail is on the Toronto Ottawa Montreal corridor, and it does get decent ridership because of it.
Also, within many Canadian metro areas, which if you live in one you’ll most likely stay inside of it for the vast majority of your daily travels, you could actually reasonably live without a car depending on where exactly you live and what you have to do. I for one live in the Vancouver area and don’t own a car. I take the bus and metro almost everywhere, and on the rare occasion I need to go somewhere that’s straight up without public transit access I just take an Uber or something. I think the fact that many of the largest Canadian cities are investing now more than ever in building more public transit, and those projects are more often than not praised by residents with high ridership to back it up is a sign that there is a high demand for non-car travel at least within urban areas. And even for smaller towns, the infrastructure is already there for good bus services like most small towns in Europe have, and if we want to go beyond that and upgrade particularly high demand routes, streetcars and tram-trains are also tried and true options for lower density urban areas. Canada even had plenty of streetcars before we decided to rip them up.
I get that this doesn’t really help people in rural or remote Canada but if we can work to reduce the need for cars in a city, where the majority of people live, that’s still a win and sets a precedent for future transit expansion into lower density areas. Non-car dependency isn’t an all or nothing deal for the entire country.
Obviously there are many challenges to Canadians finding car free alternatives. If you’re in a situation where you do need to own a car, then you need to own a car, and you shouldn’t feel bad for that. But I think that simply saying that there is no other way in Canada or that we’re just hopeless and doomed to car dependency forever due to our population density is missing a lot.
I will also recommend the YouTube channel RMTransit for really good Canadian public transit content.
Nobody is blaming the American people. It’s the car corporations that bought and dismantled light rail and train systems and lobbied the government to build cities around the car.
And now the American people are so brainwashed into thinking owning a car is freedom and public transit is “socialism” that they will fight tooth and nail against anything that is against their “freedom” to be forced to own and pay for a car.
You live in a place designed around cars, that’s the problem.
Worse: they may live in a place bulldozed to make way for cars. Plenty of car-dependent places used to have good places for walking, good transit services, all that jazz, but it was all torn down to make room for cars.
Man I was gonna type something about how it’s because your city is designed around car centric infrastructure and density and cargo bikes and shit but honestly there ain’t no way I’m gonna say anything to you that hasn’t already been said.
I think there’s this misconception that the US is basically NYC or dirt-road farmland, and the reality is that there’s a lot of in-between. I live <20 minutes from the closest mall by car, yet even transportation or food delivery apps (e.g. uber, uber eats) essentially don’t serve my area, so forget public transportation.
Most of the in-between is closer to the dirt-road farmland. Even if you live “in a city,” there’s a big chance you’ll be living a long walk through some car-dependent wasteland to the nearest anything that isn’t a house, with near-zero care, effort and/or space given to anyone who’s not in a car.
It can depend. Sometimes sprawl is car-centric because it’s heavily developed with no alternative, but sometimes there’a a lot of undeveloped land in between things.
My car is in the shop for some tricky troubleshooting.
I’ve been doing my weekly grocery shopping with my foldable bike and dog trailer. I live in a rural area, so it’s a bit of a trip. I don’t particularly enjoy it, especially the hauling the load home. It would probably be bearable with a bit of electric assist on the bike.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m giving up on public transport and going for a driving license.
Reasons include constantly late buses and trains, constant errors in signal systems and track systems, people talking loudly on phones or playing games on full volume, completely packed trains so people have to stand within centimeters of eachother.
Just got sick of all of it and realized I had enough.
It’s like with everything - trying to make maximum profits means quality goes to the bottom. I rather pay for fuel and cars and have my own car then deal with that shit anymore. I want to be happy, not sad.
Imagine if all the posting just to shit on biking and public transit just rode a bike or something instead of sucking on a tailpipe for dear fucking life.
Blocking anybody who has to argue in bad faith, I have better things to do with my time then listen to your disengenuous bullshit.
Ah, the argument of the uninformed with no leg to stand on. Imagine if you put half the energy you put into fighting advocates of alternative transportation into literally anything useful. 🤷
I as an individual can’t just go and start tearing up roads and install a light rail system. So until there are enough people voting alongside me to change our car dependent infrastructure, I’m going to have to use a car if I want to go anywhere.
The worship is in your incessent need to defend the fossil fuel addiction at all cost, your inherent absorption of driving into your sense of being so you’ll dedicate your time to attacking people who want more and better options for EVERYBODY instead of questioning why you can’t have nice things in the name of Big Oil.
I live somewhere that never had anything but car infrastructure. Should I ride my bike across a 5 line intersection to go to the mall? And before you suggest my local government install a light rail from my house to the mall, I’m surrounded by farmland.
Some of us live in places that used to be country and are slowly turning to sprawl. Public transport will work when you bulldoze an area the size of a small country and start over.
No they didn’t. They tore up railroad lines and got rid of reliable public transportation. You claim to support the environment, but you’re talking about replacing undeveloped land or farmland with a train. There isn’t enough traffic here to saturate a normal 2-lane road, much less a damn train.
Doesn’t sound like blaming people trying to get to work is the correct move, then. Sounds like the car companies are to blame. Yell at them, not random users online who have no other choice.
Battery operated devices are all over the place, there are just more components that require a battery, even small sensors here and there may use one. The current trend is pushing for this kind of automation where more devices are practically necessary. Ebikes are a part of the deal. Besides they are the best micromobility vehicles so far.
Nah you’re looking for a fight just to feel good, foolish person.
I never said anything about old folks, ya weirdo. But since you’re so adamant i actually have a disability but i’m not taking no for an answer from life.
I want to do good by our planet to the best of my ability even if it means i have a little more pain. It’s not like the pain will ever stop existing so i might as well do the right thing.
Heck an e bike would actually make my commute longer, there is no sense in getting one for myself.
I never hated on cars either, you just made that shit up like the rest that’s coming out of your mouth. If you want a car, go get it. If you need a car, go get it. If you don’t need one, GO GET IT. I don’t give a fuck.
I just know like everyone else that battery’s are also fucking bad. Same as gas, same as using up all of earths resources etc etc.
I see it as a bridge between cars and bikes, and both have a time and place. My area is pretty flat and I do it partly for the health benefits so I won’t get an e bike. But if you have tons of hills, want to haul cargo or have a longer commute I can see it. It can be a “gateway drug” for people that wouldn’t otherwise buy a bike.
My concern with e anything are the tons of batteries that will need to be properly disposed of in the coming years and how many can’t or won’t be.
which compared to regular bikes is another step back.
I initially assumed that too, but it turns out that e-bikes are even more efficient than regular bikes. In other words, holding the total amount of (food calories + electricity kWh) constant, an ebike rider can go farther than a regular bike rider on the same amount of energy.
I also recognize that it’s easy to fall into a gatekeeping attitude of considering e-bikes as “cheating” compared to regular bikes, but us cyclists have really got to work hard to get over it because it’s not helpful.
I think they called it a “step back” in terms of being worse for the environment, because of batteries, etc, while a common bike can be used for years and years without creating additional pollution.
That tech is unfortunately too far off at this point to be able to supply batteries to the surface of the earth in time to meet the demand from all the new electric vehicles we’re seeing.
0G Mining isn’t a solved problem either, but we have almost zero experience with controlled reentry of materials at that scale. We would need to manufacture heat shields in space in order to do it, which is a whole other can of worms.
It’s not too far off. NASA’s Artemis program is going surprisingly well and with it we’ll have access to resources on the Moon, especially metals that can be mined, and we can access near-Earth asteroids a lot more easily.
Hell, NASA just got a sample back from an asteroid literally a couple of days ago so I think tehnologically we’ll be okay. It’s high time we overcame those hurdles anyhow.
The issue isn’t whether we can mine space rocks, or even if we can bring back materials from space, it’s about doing it at scale and cost-effectively, soon enough for it to matter.
I’m pretty sure the cyclists out on the bike path appreciate when I pass them and take point for a few minutes. They have my 6’3"/192cm frame sitting tall and creating a nice wind break for them for a few, then I resume my full speed.
Came to say the same. Where I live (Bay Area), we have a train system that works great if you are in a supported area. If not, I don’t imagine the bus system is very convenient. I want something like the NYC subway system. I want it to be inconvenient to drive, compared to regular trains. I’d never drive to San Francisco because it’s a hassle. I want all destinations to be like this (by making the alternative more attractive, not by making driving worse).
The people that make that argument don’t care, not about electric cars or the environment or anything.
They just know “the libs” care about those things, so they mindlessly parrot whatever vapid argument they’ve picked up from other trolls that they think will make you upset.
I can. The Pepsi can be strapped to my rear seat, and the TV can go in my surfboard rack. My surfboard is 81 inches, so the TV should fit. For more cargo room those kiddie carriers that tow behind, carry more than just kids.
Actually, they are not common yet because car manufacturers knew they could potentially lose profit as it`s simpler (mechanically ) machine and thus car should break less and they would sell less as result.
But they’re a whole lot better for the planet than gas cars. And cars won’t go away till we make alternatives. Which we should do as quickly as possible, but will still take a while.
??? I hugely disagree that cars are a bigger problem than green house gas pollution. I can live in an unwalkable city. I probably can’t live on a +4°C earth.
Designing a city to be hostile to cars takes more vehicles off the road than trying to push people into electrics. Less cars (of any type) in the city means less health hazards means billions saved means billions to use on climate change research. Please don’t forget that tires are the major polluting factor right now, not exhaust gasses. I strongly believe this is more effective than trying to slowly push people into electrics which will still pollute the air with microplastics and make a ton of noise when they race through the city. Lithium is also not particularly clean to mine, so I’d prefer it was used to make batteries for bikes and other similarly sized vehicles. The world does not have the mining and processing capacity to support converting everyone to an electric car.
I usually visit my closest city for one of two reasons: 1) I have some kind of appointment or 2) I know some who lives there. Right now I’m able to drive there and park on the street. What should my alternative be once the city is “hostile” to cars? Remember, I live 30+ minutes away by car and take a highway to get there.
I think co2 ghgs global warming is by far the biggest environmental catastrophe coming our way. So the most important factor will be how will it impact co2 emissions.
As I said, we should make alternatives to driving in cities as quickly as we can. But that will still take a while. What are you suggesting in the mean time? Not going places?
EVs are much better than gas for minimizing co2 emissions. I think we should encourage them as a transitional solution till we have trains and walkable or bikeable cities.
I think we should encourage them as a transitional solution till we have trains and walkable or bikeable cities.
This is my problem. I don’t think we’ll ever reach that point when we accept half-solutions. It wouldn’t take more than a single decade to uproot our city design if we had any ambition left, but alas.
Our disagreement is that I think the societal cost of cars is more than you think, not that I think electric cars are a bad transitional step. But I also think that we live under an economic model that will kick, fight and scream the whole time we try to uproot such a massive portion of it, being the oil industry. It’s possible we just can’t fix it at this point except by radical change. I don’t have ultimate solutions, I’m just wary of electric cars because lithium mining is just as bad as oil drilling from a different direction and electric cars will kill just as many kids in the street as combustion cars.
By all means make electric vehicles- just please not cars.
Are you telling me that I, who have never owned a car in my life, are unable to leave my house? Just because you got used to your car doesn’t mean it’s the only method of transportation. If it is the only method of transportation where you live, then, and I am sorry this is the case, but you could advocate for something better instead of giving up and accepting status quo.
I am advocating specifically for the removal of policy that hinder the progress of alternative transportation. Electric cars would be fine if it was not for the fact that they are part of the policies that postpone or, in most cases, shut down alternative transportation. The inevitably city-redesign can is kicked down the road, becoming increasingly expensive as the years tack on. The best time to do something about this was 30 years ago.
Electric cars will not save the planet. Electric cars will save the car industry.
I’m not taking about you, I’m taking about me and millions of others who couldn’t walk or bike to where they work or get groceries, much less everything else. I am advocating for something better. But even if everyone was on board, it would still take years. And everyone else is very much not on board. I’m not giving up and accepting the status quo, I’m saying we need an transitional solution while we work to change things.
couldn’t walk or bike to where they work or get groceries, much less everything else.
An electric car will kick this proverbial can down the road and make the bandaid even more painful to peel off because while you think you’re doing your part for the world there are 500 politicians who are using that time you’ve given them to eradicate progress toward a better city design.
This is unfortunately the kind of problem where you have to suffer to solve it. If you can’t or won’t do that, that’s fine. I’m not gonna tell you how to live your life, I’m just telling you how this has historically played out over the last 3 decades. Capitalist innovation will not solve that capitalism is exploitative and wasteful.
No one says you have to stop driving your car while the city is undergoing restructuring. I am saying that allowing politicians to call electric cars a win will only entrench car culture even more. You have a strange “one or the other” mentality about this.
We have had every piece of technology required to solve climate chance and make cities human-centric for decades. More technology won’t change anything. A fundamental restructuring of our economic model would. Electric cars do not help us toward that goal. Electric cars allow politicians to virtue signal about how green they are, while signing free trade deals that undermine the progress being made behind your back.
… so long as you’re not leasing them, the lifetime energy cost is night and day.
The current rhetoric against EVs is reminiscent of the rhetoric against nuclear power. Yes, it’s not great. Yes, it’s not renewable. However, it gives us more time to more deeply address these issues. The successful anti-nuclear Green Peace campaigns against nuclear have done immeasurable damage to the environment in the long-term (I’m now convinced they were a big oil sock puppet all along). The same could be said for the anti-EV crowd, but the “EVs are sexy” campaign seems to be gaining more traction this time round.
Make no mistake though, the “EVs are just as bad” is a myth perpetuated by big oil.
If you can do a bike, then please do a bike (or a scooter, or one of the many options). If you can’t, then an EV is a good choice. If you can’t afford an EV. But never, ever, lease.
You’re still lugging around 1500 to 2000 kg of steel, glass & plastic to move around little more than your butt. You can do something more efficient than that, assuming the infrastructure is rigged up to handle it.
The problem is that the real way to cut down on emissions would be to accept that not every good can be available at any time and that’s a bitter pill to swallow.
We have tuna caught in South America, hauled to Thailand for canning and hauled back to the US to be sold. Turns more profit than local catches because the megacorporations can save a couple bucks on worker salaries. And that is just an example, it’s not just the food industry, hauling shit to hell and back and back to hell and back is common practice.
Doesn’t even have to be unavailable at times. They could can it in north America if they wanted to. Outsourcing jobs (read: exploiting foreign countries and their workers) should be heavily taxed if not banned in most industries
Can /c/fuckcars go back to their space now, please? I’ve blocked you annoying people for a reason… I love biking and public transport, but no… I’m not selling my car.
I don’t understand how hydrogen didn’t win the race. Transports and explodes just like gasoline. Make car go fast. Doesn’t degrade like lithium. Can be “mined” by throwing electricity at water during times of excess generation by renewables. When you burn it, it turns into water. Has none of the national security concerns of distribution of lithium mining and production in other countries.
Yeah, but they require somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of batteries to do so. Some of the more egregious ones need multiple thousands, e.g. the electric hummer whose battery alone is heavier than an ICE Honda Civic. Whereas a dozen gallons of gasoline (roughly 72lbs at 6lb/gal) can power that same ICE Civic for a nearly equivalent range, while causing much less wear & tear on the roads, and likely releasing less tire particulates due to the reduced weight. Of course it still releases CO2 and other nasties…
But yeah, the energy density of EVs is still super bad. It’s just “good enough” that we’re making it work.
Hydrogen currently doesn’t produce, store or transport well. This means it is not as economical as gasoline.
Not really a fan of lithium batts either. We’re going to end up with some environmental problems down the line but its the most economically viable tech we have at present if we’re intending on living the way we currently live.
Because right now we don’t have that much excess energy… Therefore it’s just a waste of energy to use it, because it is way less efficient. AND on top of it an hydrogen car also needs a battery just a smaller one. So it has all the downsides without any upsides. The only upside is that you can recharge your car faster and it has some more range. But both those things don’t matter for the average consumer
It makes sense for long haul trucking and aviation vs batteries, at least for now, but it doesn’t scale well for most common consumer vehicles. Any hydrogen vehicle needs to be a hybrid because there isn’t the fine tune fuel ratio control you get on traditional gasoline.
probably because of infrastructure. electric charging stations were one of the first around and if you ask a new car buyer to choose between two renewable fuel sources, they’ll chose the one with the most stations. In the US at lease, hydrogen stations have always been few and far between, and often quite pricey.
You need green energy to produce climate friendly hydrogen. This is a LOT more inefficient than to just use that green energy directly in EVs. Thus green hydrogen is also expensive and most importantly it is needed in the industry. It’s the same with e-fuels.
I don’t think any average person would know of these advantages. So theres a general lack of education about the topic.
There is also a hydrogen refueling network problem to overcome. Before public electric charging stations existed, electric people could charge at home and install their own chargers where required so the electric industry has been able to partially side step that issue at the beginning.
Finally I think it just doesn’t seem sexy. To a casual bystander it’s like gas in, pay, then drive as usual.
Hydrogen for cars is a nonsense. It is so inefficient. Unless you are making it from oil, which why the oil companies are pushing it, you lose loads of energy making it. Then it has to storages and transported, which is hard. Then the car use of it is inefficient too.
So ignoring the oil industries’ “blue hydrogen”, and looking only at “green hydrogen”, you are looking at about 22% of the energy generated ending up pushing the car forward! With an EV it is about 73%. So hydrogen car are over 3 times more expensive to run.
Plus you can just plug in an EV anywhere. With an EV, if need be, you can charge, slowly, off a normal home socket. Of course, normally, you fit faster charging at home.
Yes, but turning electricity into hydrogen doesn’t have 100% efficiency, during transport, storage and filling the car with hydrogen you lose some of it and only then you get to the fuel cell, which isn’t very efficient in itself. And then you lose a bit more (although very little) in the electric motor. All this amounts to the 22% of the guy above (didn’t check the number btw, but it sounds plausible)
To be fair, i think it may have some use for fleet vehicles like taxis and long range buses because these are applications where being able to refill in minutes at a fuel depo you already run actually matters as compared to the stress you would put on a large battery fast charging day in day out. I also believe that Japan has a nuclear plant that is being built with the capacity to efficacy generate hydrogen directly. That being said, for personal vehicles I can’t really see the market of people who need that fast of a refil being large enough to reach the economies of scale necessary to be practical.
Afaik it has a higher energy density than common batteries, so it could be useful in things like aviation where this is the main concern and you can build special infrastructure to support it.
The frustrating thing is that a car running on hydrogen works really well, has a pretty long range and can be refueled quickly, so it looks like a good alternative. It’s only when you ask how that hydrogen was made and how it arrived at the refueling station that things start to fall appart.
You can use liquified hydrogen which need to be chilled and insulated, and will evaporate away in a short time if not properly sealed
Or you use compressed hydrogen which means you are basically carrying an IED that weighs several hundred kilograms with the amount of pressure inside the gas tank
And hydrogen combustion is as others have said, inefficient.
Another issue is that you also need to use basically pure oxygen if you want to use a hydrogen fuel cell, otherwise the catalyst inside the cell would get poisoned
And well, there is a car that did all that, the Toyota Mirai, but that also pretty much ended in commercial failure, due to lack of hydrogen filling infrastructure and a whole load of other reasons.
Everybody keeps talking about all the problems storing hydrogen, but that’s just quitter talk. You know how you solve 'em quick and easy? You simply combine the hydrogen with some carbon to make a convenient liquid fuel! As a bonus, you don’t even need to develop fancy new fuel cell tech: you can burn it in the same engines we already have.
I’m entertained by the fact that everyone gets hung up on how EVs are still not totally green because the electricity comes from coal fired plants or that there’s still manufacturing emissions and stuff…
It’s like, yeah, but compared to an ICE car, which has all the same problems (environmental cost of manufacturing the vehicle, mining and refining the fuel, transporting it, etc) but EVs don’t actively pollute nearly as much during use, and they speak as if these are of equal environmental cost, and they’re not. Additionally, ICE vehicles need a lot more oil to operate that needs to be changed and disposed of every few thousand miles.
It’s like doing less harm isn’t valuable to the people arguing against it, but then again, those are probably the same people who drive their V8 truck to get groceries.
The magical Nirvana solution that will turn our society into Star Trek still isn’t here, so we need to obstruct less harmful solutions while failing to offer anything usable.
Still, nuclear energy has a very good carbon footprint (unlike coal plants) and the public image of them being polluters was a joint disinformation project by Greenpeace and the oil companies in the early 2000s. Greenpeace backpedaled hard on their stance in the recent years.
Larger engines (such as those in power plants) are also generally more efficient. And RVs don’t use oil to drive the oil to where the car can get oil - we have the grid (a modern wonder of the world) to do that for us.
They will continue to astroturf any and all arguments no matter how stupid to see what sticks. We must continue to refute these idiotic claims and progress towards cleaner air
Environmental impact is still less than ICE, yes, but until we figure out a better way to process lithium and make batteries last longer hybrids still have a smaller environmental impact over the lifetime of the vehicle. Eventually we need to cut out petrol entirety of course, but until we get clean batteries the better short-term solution is hybrids when a vehicle is strictly necessary, and bikes or waking in all other cases. An electric motorcycle might be a good short-term solution too, but as of now battery manufacturing is unacceptably dirty. But as you said, it’s still better than ICE. I just think hybrid would be better as a transition while the technology is improved.
From a practical standpoint, hybrid cars make no sense. You inherit the problems of both electric and fossil and you gain pretty much nothing. I don’t understand why they are still being made.
I understand the electric bit is cheaper and more efficient in city traffic while the fossil bit is more supported over long distance travel.
It seems intended for the teething stage where the charging point infrastructure isn’t rolled out extensively enough for pure EV usage, and public transport doesn’t do the thing.
I see a risk in complacency where the final steps aren’t taken of rolling out charging points and buffing transit because hybrids are “good enough”. Probably not a massive risk though as fossil’s stigma grows and fuel prices rise.
I agree that battery tech needs to be better. We also need to put in the work now to improve the grid so that when there’s wide scale adoption, the grid won’t collapse under the strain.
For the most part it’s a transit issue… we simply cannot move that many watts of power.
For the rest of it, and hybrids versus full electric vs bikes vs walking, that’s a much larger discussion, since not everyone will be able to adopt something more green than a highly efficient vehicle (whether hybrid or EV or otherwise)…
My main point is that they’ll argue dumb crap like manufacturing, that causes so much pollution, and say it in a way that almost seems like they think that ICE cars are better for that, somehow?
It’s like, we know it’s not “carbon neutral” or whatever… it’s just carbon massively reduced and that’s the point Carl.
Actually hybrid cars aren’t more green than electric cars. As much as electric cars aren’t perfect, they are by far the greenest option. Don’t trust oil lobbies :)
It’s like, yeah, but compared to an ICE car, which has all the same problems (environmental cost of manufacturing the vehicle, mining and refining the fuel, transporting it, etc) but EVs don’t actively pollute nearly as much during use, and they speak as if these are of equal environmental cost, and they’re not. Additionally, ICE vehicles need a lot more oil to operate that needs to be changed and disposed of every few thousand miles.
None of that is the real problem with electric cars.
The real problem with electric cars is that they’re still cars, which means they embody the same arrogance of space as regular cars. In other words, they take up too much space – both while driving and while parked – physically forcing trip origins and destinations further apart and ruining the city not only for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders, but even also for the drivers themselves.
(That last link is from the perspective of a car enthusiast, by the way.)
I’m not going to argue with you on that point, I think cars are too big in the first place. With electric vehicles they can be reconfigured to ebikes or something much, much smaller. but I’m only mentioning the ICE vs EVs cost of manufacturing and how “green” they are. It’s a step in the right direction; it’s not the whole journey. Walkable cities and more compact designs of metro areas is still something that needs to be done, but it’s an entirely separate argument to the one I was making.
As someone who primarily drives because I live in a small suburb in the middle of a farm region, I’d be happy to park at the edge of a larger city and walk/bike/e-scooter/transit my way into the city. I think transit costs and the costs associated with most of the bike/e-bike/scooter services to be a bit high, given that I just drove to the city in the first place, but that’s a minor gripe among the plethora of other issues it could and would likely solve to have the city more pedestrian friendly.
Personally, given where I live, I’m more or less obligated to have a car, and if that car is a PHEV or full EV, would benefit the world overall; maybe not by a lot, but certainly more than using ICE vehicles to get around.
I just visited the US and I was dumbfounded how insane your city planning is. Like you literally can’t just make a short shopping trip on foot. You’d have to walk half an hour to even reach basic stores because the sprawl is so bad (City in CA with about 100k inhabitants) and then there are parking spaces everywhere. Like atleast half to 2/3 of the land space is used for parking. And ofc most parking is planned so they can accomodate everyone which means they’re always atleast half empty.
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