Electric cars: The equivalent of switching from binge drinking whiskey to binge drinking wine.

Right is possible if economy is local. Left is actual real life because of capitalism needs bigger markets in in small areas for maximing profits.

Sorry, chief. We don't do nuanced thought in this community.

They are a patch, not a solution.

I'd call them less a solution, more an attempt at harm reduction.

And the only things they'll properly resolve are tailpipe emissions and idling noise. At least one of which is of no concern when dealing with the externalities of car traffic.

If you really want to solve the environmental impact of transportation, you minimise the need for transportation. Put homes and workplaces close together, offer mass alternatives for the pairs where you really do need motorised mobility solutions, and minimise the number of situations where it's more convenient to take a car. Ban on-street parking and heavily tax off-street parking. Need to park your car in the city? Hope you can afford to pay an arm and a leg. Oh, you can't? Looks the Park & Ride at the train station two towns over is the nearest alternative. Don't worry though, the trains go six times an hour and a day ticket is, like, four quid max.

Solution to what though? Emissions are reduced but not eliminated: when accounting for greenhouse gases emitted during production, EVs start outperforming traditional cars only after 5+ years of use (depending on the type of car). And other factors like tyre dust and road maintenance (due to EVs' higher weight) or resources needed to replace/recycle old batteries are not even included in that balance.

EVs might still be a net positive when compared with traditional cars, but both pale in comparison to public transport and infrastructure oriented towards bikes and pedestrians.

I don't think they're even a solution. They're just another scam like hydrogen fuel cells were. They exist to keep people from pushing for the real change we actually need... Just like the decade we lost because people bought the hydrogen fuel cell grift last time.

I think the point is that compared to public transport when transporting a large number of people, they are inefficient.

A reasonable comment in this community? Get out!

I think you missed the meaning of inefficency on this matter...

While it is undeniable that electric cars have a better supply-to-engine energy efficency than combustion cars, you can understand that they are equiparated in the meme as "equally bad" if you think outside of the box labelled "rubber wheels on high friction asphalt transporting usually a single individual".

Compare that with a tram or a train, transporting multiple passengers with the same electric engine but also steel-on-steel friction on the wheels and the difference between an ICE and EV vehicle becomes a mere approximation error; god I can do the math for you if you want, but I bet even a disel bus with a lot of passengers has a better efficency/passenger ratio than an EV.

So 1 electric car = 4 less carbon liquid fuelled cars worth of pollution.

Also I think this is a bit misleading: if I buy an EV this won't magically destroy 4 (where is this number from?) already existing carbon liquid cars, it merely means you avoided adding 1 other ICE car to the total.

When is it efficient to carry several tons of steel with you to pick up eggs and milk?

I mean, Jevon's Paradox works because the increased efficiency leads to decreased costs. It's unclear if that's going to be the case for electric cars because the hardware needed to get to that high efficiency is so expensive, and mostly made cost-effective by government assistance (I.e. eletric cars here in the UK do not pay road tax).

I'm also not sure if lowered costs would massively change the number of drivers (at least in the developed world) in the EU there's one car for every two people. We're not going to see that become 5 cars for every two people just because the efficiency increases, demand is too inelastic.

Sure maybe a mega SUV as a daily driver is not right for everyone, but I just can't live without the extra leg room and riot protection!

Emission laws made big trucks easier to produce than small trucks in the US, I miss the days of the short bed pickup. Still like my 98 taco and use it for hauling hay.

The idea that you even need a car for grocery shopping is insane.

I live in Scandinavia, in one of these walkable cities. Everyone has a car. Why? Because relying on public transport or walking/biking everywhere is not practical. It's just reality.

It does, because the batteries for electric cars have a reliance on rare earth metals.

Lol the downvotes are hilarious. We will not solve climate change with electric cars. Public transit in walkable communities with niche uses for cars and trucks are the only way forward.

Ah yes conservatism, the famous side of rational thinking and anti-bias thoughts, such as avoiding the perfect solution bias
Your comment having so many upvotes is disgusting

I think both sides are lacking nuance here. If you shit on people getting electric vehicles or just thinking of getting one because that's not far enough: fuck you. But also, for people that just switched or are thinking of getting one but then see something like this and slam into reverse and say "I'm gonna support ICE cars till the day I die to spite those overly hostile woke liberals": fuck you too.

People should be able to take the information in a more nuanced way, and should stop swinging from extreme to extreme which has led to the current fucked state of politics

This is a lot like this Bors comic https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-You-made-me-become-a-Nazi

Do honest people really migrate to "climate change is fake and queer people are a threat" because someone was mean to them online? Probably not often.

Keep churning that pipeline to fascism.

Oh no, some liberals were being mean to me on the internet. Guess I'll just vote against my own interests to spite them...

I shit on liberals mostly because of their notions on 'altruistic capitalism'. As soon as they purchase an EV, they think they're out there saving the world and most don't think critically past that.

I really have to agree that it's posts like this that made me give up on left wing politics, in certainly not right wing but I see no hope for the left until fundermental problems are fixed which I don't believe politics or media is capable of addressing.

Further I am absolutely convinced a large portion of the loudest voices on climate change are so obsessed because they desperately want it to be the big doom that fucks up all the impressive things other people are achieving.

In fact, low speed electric cars are quiet enough that they've considered putting speakers in them to alert pedestrians and make the absence of feedback less disconcerting for drivers.

We're so used to ICE cars that they've contemplated making electric cars pretend that they have an ICE.

I like my car. Nothing will change that opinion, because nothing beats having a personal vehicle.

You can be happy about the step in the right direction and still acknowledge that it is by all means a half measure.

The reason this makes people so unhappy is we have a clock on our planet due to the amount of carbon we're releasing.

It's doubly frustrating when we've had the solutions to these issues for a long time but lobbying by the motor industry has kept them out of hands of the public.

If you only have the option to drive and it looks like it will never change where you live, then yes, driving electric is better than driving an ICE car. You're not the problem for needing to live your life with the limited options you have access to. However, that does not mean the intrinsic problems with cars disappear the instant they become electric, and this meme is mainly meant to respond to the techbro people who think just because electric cars exist now it makes transit obsolete or it solves literally everything wrong with cars in general, and use that to actively resist public transportation or attempt to turn public opinion against it. I should have added additional context to make that clearer.

People are advocating for denser cities with better public transport, not for you to use the shitty bus in your suburb.

Haven't driven in over a decade, can confirm it's like living a dream

but if you don’t…

...then either you're a farmer or the area you live was built wrong and needs to be fixed.

Well, can't you resettle in a more compact town?

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Depending on the ICE car, a similar EV can actually be more noisy, because of the heavy battery causing more road friction = more noise.

Paved roads disrupt rainwater movement as they physically block water from permeating and also have fast flowing storm drains. They have been shown to significantly reduce groundwater replenishment and increase the speed and volume of run off into rivers and streams, which exacerbates flooding risks.

from all the roads making flooding easier

You can't simply go with the manufacturing emissions, you have to look at the entire life cycle of the vehicles in question.

It heavily depends on the battery technology used in that particular vehicle and the economy of scale. The emissions reduce as the build batches increase

Has doors and seats 😠: ✅

I think that the solution is automated rail transit. Being in a dedicated place with lower likelihood of encountering people removes nearl every issue that self-driving cars have. Being automated means that 24/7 schedules are possible. If there are enough trains and high enough saturation, need for cars and even taxis is removed.

Why does it matter if they're driverless or not? They still perform the same function and go off and serve other people when you're not using one.

It should be automatic this year!... Ooh wait.

TIL! That sounds awesome.

Can you buy them now or are they still being developed? Got a link? Looks like they're still working on it, I'm not seeing them online.

Car fires from ICE's are magnitudes more common and cause more damage every year because of this. If you spent half a second to search this you'd find that reports indicate that per 100,000 vehicles sold in their respective powertrains in their lifetime, 25 electric cars catch fire, and 1,530 gas vehicles catch fire. While searching this, something that caught me off guard and surprised me was that hybrids are even higher, 3,475! The more you know.

Ebikes aren't actually overpriced. Unless you buy them from Specialized. All those components are actually just that expensive. I can tell you this for sure because I compared the cost of building my own electric bike and buying a prebuilt one and I ended up going prebuilt.

Ebikes are not expensive. At least not the ones I have and see around town.

All cars are expensive. What's your point?

Ok but this isn't reddit

Bravo

For the appearance of XYZ we need a policy and cultural change, and for that we need to be very vocal about how stupid and inefficient cars are (i.e. hurr durr automobiles bad).

"Does anyone here have enough humility to understand there's a similar checklist of things an automobile solves?"

Firstly, this feels a very confrontational way of phrasing the question. It carries with it the assumption that you are right and everyone else is wrong, which I don't feel is a helpful way of approaching a discussion.

Yes, of course people realise that car ownership is the only viable solution for individuals at the current time. You have engaged with a community who are passionate about and engaged in urban planning, so they are going to be more switched onto the challenges than most.

The entire point is that on their own they are not a sustainable solution long-term. They are hugely inefficient energy and space-wise, their infrastructure causes massive damage to the communities they carve through (see this Guardian article for a breakdown of some NA case studies), and they currently cause a huge amount of environmental damage.

So, the question becomes: how can we remove the need for car ownership? There's a host of ideas, from better high speed rail links to eliminate long-distance trips, to micromobility and demand responsive transport for short-distance, to better constructing our cities to begin with to allow for amenities to be walkable. Are we going to eliminate car use in rural areas? Of course not; there's no point running a bus service for a village of 10 people and a goat. Can we eliminate 99% of car trips for those in built up areas, improving air quality, walkability, and accessibility? That should absolutely be the goal.

TL;DR: hurr durr fuck cars

Yes. Nobody is suggested we should ban all cars everywhere.

Cars are incredible. I do trips to remote places all the time that would be impossible without cars. There's no better way to transport 5 people and their gear for a week to a place that's 100km from the nearest small town.

But for 1 guy commuting from the suburbs to work in the city every day in their SUV? Fuck that, the system is broken to even entertain that as a possibility.

Congratulations on taking public transport far more than most car owners you must be very proud

or you could bring in headphones to public transport like the rest of us

also lmao "public transportation where each person or group could ride in their own automated pod", you're either advocating for taxis or straight up segregation

Fuck off, that's a societal problem.

Fix that first, it's a minor thing in modern countries

The problem is that it isn't a matter of cars vs busses. It's a matter of urban design in general.

Public transit gets better as density goes up. A bus that drops you off at a giant-ass Walmart parking lot with nothing else but two drivethroughs in walking distance isn't very useful. A bus that drops you off in a neighborhood with 4 dozen shops, a dozen restaurants, 4 bars and 3 coffee shops within a 5 minute walk is way more useful.

By contrast, density makes driving worse. Density means more people are driving the same way you want to go. More people in cars means more traffic on the road with you. Designing for cars pushes you to low density sprawl.

Just building public transit isn't the solution. Just building public transit in a typical American suburban sprawl makes something about as compelling as a Ford F150 in Vatican City.

You have to fix urban design - stop building stroads and start building streetcar suburbs again.

It's only an in place solution in some places in Europe, not in the US. When I was living in the UK I didn't need a car. I did in the US.

Subsidised public transportation. If you are scared of "Socialism" have it funded by a business tax as businesses will be the main beneficiary.

I mean, step 1 would be forcing the suburbs to pay the actual cost for their own power lines, plumbing and sewage, roads, phone lines, etc. Since as it stands, most of that cost is subsidised by the highly productive inner city, and that infrastructure is far cheaper per-person in dense neighbourhoods than it is in suburban tumours (sure, live out there if you want, but accept that you will either be paying a fortune for the infrastructure upkeep that supports you, or accept lower-class, cheaper infrastructure. I have a great aunt and uncle who live out in the countryside, and they have a dirt road, a septic tank and a rainwater tank, only their electricity and phone lines are comparable to what you get in cities, because it literally does not make economic sense to run paved roads or plumbing out to where they live).

Once people have realised that single-family housing with paved roads, sewage, plumbing and reliable electricity is well outside the economic reach of the vast majority of people, UPZONE. Demolish suburbs to replace them with far denser urban neighbourhoods, ones made up of townhouses, apartment blocks and mixed residential/commercial buildings. Change the zoning laws so that anyone can start a commercial business out of the front yard. Designate parks and other community areas in between your blocks of apartments and townhouses so that nobody is ever more than 15 minutes' walk away from one. And for those who still want to live out in suburban sprawl, make the transition to being more self-sufficient easier.

Then, you have a city dense enough that you can start running vast amounts of public transport through it. Not just busses, but trains and trams as well. A train is more or less the ideal form of fast transportation along a known, unchanging transport corridor, with far more energy efficiency than anything that runs on tarmac, the ability to hit highway speeds inside city limits, and the ability to be extended almost infinitely. They can also be run from overhead power lines, no need for batteries or internal combustion engines. Oh, and the same lines you run urban rail along can also be used for freight trains, so they can replace both car journeys and freight truck journeys.

When you have dense cities with well-designed and extensive public transport, you can get almost anywhere with just one transfer, your bus/train/tram comes often enough that you're never at the stop for more than 10 minutes, and even a trip from one edge of the city to the other will rarely be more than an hour. Plus, you don't have to pay attention to the road, nor pay for fuel and maintenance.

Source: I live in a city where you can sharply draw a divide between the pre-car and post-car zones, and the pre-car zones are mostly like how I describe, while the post-car zones are suburban sprawl shitholes that might have a train station if they're lucky

"Is there a better solution? Before you answer, don't"