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Electric cars became more affordable across much of the world in 2025 — except the U.S
(restofworld.org)
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Good or bad, most Americans need a car for everyday life. Particularly for areas that cannot be served by mass transit, electric car adoption is essential to reduce societal emissions.
Which is why I drive a dumb fartbox that doesn’t even shift for me and not Formica countertops with an iPad and a game controller.
I'm curious what will happen as increasingly large numbers of young Americans are delaying and rejecting driving.
That's only a widespread option in urban areas with that have invested in mass transit. American suburbs are ultimately designed around car usage, and rural areas are too sparsely populated for mass transit to ever be viable there.
So what happens when people aren't getting licenses? Do these areas change? Do the people relocate? Does the area simply atrophy?
Many people leave rural areas for urban areas for economic reasons, but high housing costs in those urban areas lead people to settle in suburban areas where car usage is often essential.
I don't see any indicators that people are not getting driver's licenses en masse; the number of licensed drivers has continued to increase, something that can't fundamentally change without a substantial increase in public funding for mass transit or a decrease in the urban sprawl that characterizes many American suburbs.
And to add to that, even if one does live in a city where they don't need a car for day to day activities, if you ever want to leave the downtown and urban transit network (if it exists) your options are incredibly limited. I'm about to get an apartment and I probably could bike to work if I wanted to in good weather (would kinda suck and require crossing a large road with no pedestrian crossings whatsoever) but going to see family or my partner that lives 2 hours by car away is impossible.
I would love to take a train for both of those things, and there even is one (1) amtrak line from my home city that goes to one useful place for me but nowhere else in the state, and even that one line is only a couple days a week and almost never works out unless it's actively planned around.
I was referencing articles such as: https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/05/17/gen-z-less-likely-get-drivers-license/73678202007/
It's a well-documented trend. Although housing is more expensive in urban areas, the cost savings of not dealing with a car can offset some of this. I think $10k/year is a commonly cited average cost for owning and operating a car.
Is adopting new surveillance technologies part of that goal to reduce emissions?
If not, maybe we should try to consider how to have electric vehicles that do not surveil us?
I'm all for less surveillance in cars, but American cars don't have any less surveillance than Chinese ones, so using it as a reason to prevent their import is a bit disingenuous.
What more Americans could use are more affordable cars—particularly affordable electric cars—and competition with Chinese imports would help that happen.
Surveillance in new cars is a reason to not buy new cars.
No matter where it's country of origin is.
I would rather modify an old I.C.E. car to be electric than to buy anything that reduces my freedom or charges me subscriptions for basic features.
So you don’t have a cell phone/smart phone, right? Or smart tv? Or streaming box? Or a windows computer? Or a car with TPMS sensors?
Because they’re all tracking you, and that’s just a few off the top of my head. Yes, you can limit what and how is tracking you, but when it really starts to cut into the quality of life, most people don’t care. And yes, great, you’re not most people but that’s not what people think about. If they did, digital privacy laws would be radically different.
Anyway, to go along with my old non-surveillance-infested cars:
Checkmate, troll.
But go on, explain how none of that matters and we should all be little bitches like you who just willingly bend over for the corpo-stalkers. Explain how your bullshit comment is anything other than fucking worthless doomerism.
I'm trying out SailfishOS myself
Concur…
However, I gleefully await the modders to teach me how to remove that when I eventually get an EV