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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Fuck Cars
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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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You must account for
The sourcing of materials
The manufacturing costs
The transportation costs
The usage costs (electricity generation, tires, batteries, parts)
The cost of the infrastructure (roads, car centric design making things farther away, massive parking lots, maintaince and snow clearing)
And the cost of disposal when the product is finished its life.
This type of analysis is called a lifecycle analysis.
The EV is here to save the car industry, not the planet.
Asking purely from a point of ignorance - is that not the same for ICE cars? Sourcing of battery components is a clear difference, but ICE cars also require materials to be sourced, manufactured, transported, usage input costs, drive on the same infrastructure, and also require disposal after they're no longer operable.
Are these metrics truly that different between EV and ICE cars? If not, then all we're really saying is that "making cars is not good for the environment" which, while accurate, seems like an insane point to use against EVs when comparing them to ICE
Yes, thats the point. EVs are still cars and have a massive individual resource and space requirement. Shifting away from car centric design would save energy and space in urban environments. Transit shares it's life cycle with many more people than private vehicles do which spreads its larger resource and energy demand accross a signifcantly larger ridership.
I completely agree with that message, but until we get to that point there is a clear utility for EVs.
Shifting urban development to be less car-centric overall will take decades of effort, if not generations, and we can't expect people to quit their commuter job, sell their car, and find an overlap of employment and public transport that works for the planet when there's no social or infrastructural support for it.
In the meantime, to me at least, it makes sense to transition to EVs instead of ICE while that infrastructure is developed. It seems to me that perfect (a public transportation focused society) is becoming the enemy of good (reduced emissions for the sea of single person vehicles we currently have), or at least that is frequently my perception when every thread talking about EVs has people in the comments mentioning manufacturing costs as a hurdle, when the only plausible alternative is ICE vehicles with more environmental impact
We can't, but we also can't expect it to be possible to change if we don't stop zoning in such low and sprawling densities. The more car centric infrastructure we build, the deeper the hole gets. We can build transit prioritized neighbourhoods and also encourage EV development, but the former is nearly illegal to build in much of North America.