this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Fuck Cars
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Electric cars are not a "green solution". Because of all the associated costs to produce and maintain them:
The battery requires rare minerals that are to be mined elsewhere (Africa, China, south america...), in abject conditions.
The host country needs to deploy charging stations, plugged to the grid, which has a high cost in copper, contributing to point above.
The internal wiring of the car also increase the cost, contributing also to the first point.
And what to do of all the defective/old batteries ?
I agree on mass transit. Highly recommend Adam Something's youtube video on why self driving cars will increase traffic and waste. Its not a solution for cities large or small. Rural communities may see benefits but they pose weirder problems.
Because at least in the US the airline and car industries hand shake to stop commuter trains.
The west coast regions also have an additional problem where the slopes will need massive amounts of tunnels for high speed rail and are complicated by a lot active geologic zones. So while its the best solution (trains) its expensive but Japan managed to do it. Its not going to be cheap or quick to build the needed infrastructure. Add in most people are heavily invested in car infrastructure when they buy a car. So there's a public will barrier here built out of billions of garages, cars, and driveways sold.
People also pose "flying cars" etc as a solution. Piloting air vehicles requires air traffic controllers and communicating on an extreme level in addition to pilot licenses and security problems. Its not also not a serious answer to transportation.
Also for flying cars, when a non-flying car breaks down suddenly, it can be a dangerous situation but you just need to avoid hitting anything until your momentum is lost and generally have options (brakes might lose power assist but could work, if they don't there's still emergency brakes, and if those also fail, there's engine braking if you have transmission control, or steering back and fourth to lose momentum via turning friction, and once you're going slow enough, even colliding with something stationary can help).
With flying cars, maybe it can glide, assuming it even works like that and isn't more of a helicopter or just using some kind of thrusters. Plus, if you're falling to your death anyways, you might not have the presence of mind to try to optimize what you do hit with what control you do have to minimize damage to others. Hell, the safety feature might even be ejecting and leaving it to fall wherever, while hoping none of the other flying cars hit you or your parachute, or fly close enough to mess with the airflow in a way where the parachute might fail.
And that's not even going into how much more energy it takes to fly vs roll.
Flying cars don't make practical sense. And where they do, we already have helicopters.
A two hour commute in an electric car is still two hours in crushing, soul destroying traffic. People ask me why I take a train and a freeway bus for my two days on campus, and I ask them why not? My drive is three minutes from my house to the train.
But in suburban Southern California, public transit is "for freaks and losers." That was deliberate marketing.
same for norcal, around bayarea, constantly getting the nagging, why arent you driving instead of taking the bus.
It just sucks if 10 minutes by car/a little more by bike become 45 minutes by public transit, once an hour until 8pm.
thats a little overexaggerating, at most its takes twice as long depending on which bus and route you are taking.
Need to pick your battles tbh.
If you tell every driver to give up driving, the planet ain't getting saved.
Need to pick your battles tbh.
Trump admin cuts $60M for bullet train. Can railway from Dallas to Houston still happen?
The high-speed rail project intended to connect Houston and Dallas in just 90 minutes.
We literally cannot build trains in this country because we self-sabotage every opportunity.
Houston is getting $4B to redo I-45 but can't be spared $60M on state mandated planning for an already established rail route.
This isn't a question of abolishing cars. It's a question of abolishing trains which we appear dead set on doing.
You can't really expect a man advised by the CEO of the world's most valuable car company to make a decision in favour of public transport.
And frankly the man would cut his own dick off if he thought it would be of use to the poor.
In any case, the real alternative to cars was staring us in the face all through COVID. How many people wake up every day, jump into 2-3 tons of their own personal metal, drive for an hour, only to sit staring at the same screens they were looking at through Remote Desktop for 18 months, then do the same thing to get home?
But we can't have that forever, because fuck us.
You can’t really expect a man advised by the CEO of the world’s most valuable car company to make a decision in favour of public transport.
He literally also had a rail company that he'd been plugging for over a decade.
the real alternative to cars was staring us in the face all through COVID. How many people wake up every day, jump into 2-3 tons of their own personal metal, drive for an hour, only to sit staring at the same screens they were looking at through Remote Desktop for 18 months, then do the same thing to get home?
There's material benefit to second and third spaces when collaborating on large, long term projects. And suburbanization is as much at the root of the two hour commute as simple office work.
That said, sure. Telecommuting does quickly what infrastructure improvements would need decades to accomplish.
But we can’t have that forever, because fuck us.
Everything has to be in the service of the short term profitablity of landlords.
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I agree. My boyfriend and I were forced to buy a car some years ago because public transport in our area kept cutting budgets to the point that he would have to get up at 3.30-ish in the morning in order to get to work at 8.
We were avid users of public transport for our whole lives and wanted to support it until we were no longer given a choice, but to cave. If I have to go somewhere nowadays, he drives me because of how shit public transport has become in our country. It is genuinely pathetic. He made this decision on both of our behalf after a longer train ride of mine ended in me being stuck on a train station an hour away from home at 2 in the morning, having to wait for the next train home at 4.30. He jumped in the car and came and got me and that was one of the last times I used public transport. Really sucks when you want to support it, but it doesn't want to support you.
When I have a full disk and have no storage space left. I open a program and see a visual representation of the largest files taking space. I clear them out first because its easy and quick.
For some reason, when we have too much CO2 going into the atmosphere, we see the visual representation of who is polluting the most, and take care of the smallest, little fragmented space. We don't select the larger chunks like industry, aviation, marine transport, we pick each individual car and press delete.
Look, cars have to change and Americans will have to be dragged kicking and screaming but It kind of pains me when someone looks at an old car someone is driving, using it way past its intended lifetime, and tells them they are the problem. While being perfectly fine taking an airplane twice yearly and ordering shit from china, shit they will forget they ordered before it actually arrives..
That because the big files right now are the OS. Just deleting system32 isn't a good idea, but moving to a more efficient system is difficult. So we do the easy thing and delete old PDFs, and maybe some old games. But the system needs to be changed, and the sooner the better.
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We don’t select the larger chunks like industry, aviation, marine transport, we pick each individual car and press delete.
In fairness...
The nuclear powered cargo ship is already here.
And as China is the premier builder of trans-Pacific cargo ships (1,500 to 1,700 ships per year, which is more than the US has built in the last ten) this is technically getting addressed.
Also, incidentally, the premier electric car manufacturers are almost entirely East Asian. The only functional airplane manufacturer is French. Heavy industry in the US is on the verge of total collapse (outside AI and Bitcoin mining).
The US plan to cut emissions is basically just Degrowth.
Nice. A flase dichotomy so the right can cut EV subsidies as well as not spending on public transport.
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I often wonder how the emissions generated by producing and shipping a new electric vehicle compare to just keeping your old ICE vehicle until it rusts to pieces. Like how long does it take to break even from that?
It depends how quickly you put on miles (and which study you base the calculation on). For most EVs, they break even with the emissions of an ICE car at about 15k miles. By 200k, the EV emitted 52% less emissions compared to the average car.
If the electric grid is powered by more renewables in the future, that would jump to 78% less emissions at 200k.
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That's a problem, but small/micro particles aren't the only metric. The gases released by exhaust are also a real problem for people that walk nearby cars, and they're in a big quantity in certain cars.
But yea, balancing all of this is complicated.
Does having heavier electric cars with no exhaust but more tire usage (because heavier cars) so more particles in the air beneficial? I don't believe we have serious studies about this, but it could change the meta.
Hear me out here, less cars regardless of their enegry source will reduce both exhaust and microplastics. We don't have to trade one for the other when we can build alternatives that don't produce either.
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Particulates are bad, sure, but they're not what's causing climate collapse.
Climate collapse should more accurately be called global ecological collapse. Emissions are only one part of the problem, and the hyper focus on emissions allows other problems like plastics or habitat destruction to go unsolved. They’re all connected though. Our ability to fight climate change is intricately connected to how healthy the global ecology is.
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Even if every car on the road was electric, the world will still become an ash pile in 50 years.
It's more blaming the people for the problems of the rich, who will never be seriously regulated. It's easier to blame all of us.
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