Cars, car infrastructure, people preferring to live far out and drive to work – those are choices that can be made individually and collectively in a society-respecting way.
Driving an ICE car is a choice that affects the entire planet. When you do that, you’re doing something immoral no matter what.
Driving electric essentially illuminates the most immoral aspect of the entire driving your car thing. It is a moraly superior choice, and you should feel good about it.
And now that we removed “if we all drive the world will end” from the discussion, we can in a civilized manner discuss and decide how many cars and where do we want.
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Oh, sorry, this is lemmy, lemme quickly correct myself: burn every Tesla you see to stick it to the billionaires! Revolution starts today!
To paraphrase Alan Fisher, electric cars fail to solve the biggest problem with cars: The fact that they’re still cars.
buying a tesla feeds the orange
The main attractor to me is that with an electric car, you could theoretically be energy independent. Same goes with an ebike.
Eg, Solar -> battery -> EV/ebike
No need to be relying on rotten dinosaurs dug up out of wherever, with a million middle men and taxes.
I agree with you in spirit, but the reality is you would not actually be energy independent. The parts that you’re talking about, for the car and the batteries and repairing the car, those are going to be produced somehow. So even if your fuel is produced by solar panels, there are still fossil fuels involved in the manufacture of everything. That’s still a massive improvement over burning gas while you drive.
This is basically the philosophy of the Amish. I’ll pass.
I can’t buy a metro line for my city, I can make sure my next car is electric. Buying an electric car is morally superior to buying a gas car.
I mean, while we still have so much car centric infrastructure in the states, they can be a useful transition.
I say this as someone who primarily commutes by bicycle btw. Public transit in my area is piss poor. Unpredictable buses, no light rail. Hell there aren’t even sidewalks everywhere.
My wife recently got a fully electric car, and I support that move. She is not ready to go car free. But at least we are not necessarily burning fossil fuels to power trips to the grocery store. I think the closest power plants to us are nuclear and hydroelectric. Im sure there’s a coal plant in the mix too tho.
Would never give elon a cent of our money though
It’s better to transition private cars now because that’s going to take years in and of itself and it’s relatively easy and fast to swap out the centralized power plants for greener options later. Swap out one dirty power plant for a green plant and everything electric connected to it is instantly greener in turn.
Even if the US went all in on public infrastructure today, it would still take decades
Not giving any money to Musk though, there are other options.
You’re so right…using electricity to drive here in Texas is so much less carbon intensive than gasoline powered engines it’s not even close. Switching to an EV instantly makes a huge difference in your carbon footprint
@cm0002 @ByteOnBikes yes, but the idea that EV’s solve things makes people think it is okay to not be all in on PT.
And it’s not okay.
I generally agree with this sentiment: fuck cars in general, but we can’t discount the reduction in oil demand associated with EVs. Transportation accounts for 50%ish of total emissions. That’s a big piece of the pie in terms of emissions reduction. Further, storage and reduction don’t translate at a 1:1 ratio. If you reduce, you’re much better off than storing in terms of carbon.
Do we need a much better transportation system? Absofuckingloutley. EVs can help transition, at least in the short term but I see hybrid of trains/buses and micromobility as the path forward
Buy Tesla’s what?
Tesla’s thinking duh
Seems like it’s an outdated opinion, or a pro-ICE car one. Fossil fuel is here to stay and a lot of car maker is slowing down the electric car adaptation and goes into hybrid instead. EV will not save the car industry unless countries ban ICE car, which might be a few decades away globally from actually materialise. There’s still infrastructure lacking for people to charge their car, there’s still battery fire for them to worry about, and there’s still range anxiety.
And despite all that, people who decided to purchase an EV 5 or so years ago does help to push the thing to wider market, and that’s a good thing. Of course it’s better if people swap to multimodal commuting, but right now a lot of places doesn’t have that privilege.
In general, EV alone isn’t gonna save the planet, there’s shit tons of thing to do before we move toward that goal, and EV is part of that thing.
Fossil fuel is here to stay
Um, as a nonrenewable resource, I think we can disagree.
We will run out, and sooner than most people think.
The problem we should be trying to solve is how can we still manufacture things, without fossil fuels?
All the green technology today still depends on fossil fuels in their manufacturing. If we can’t figure out alternatives, and fast, it won’t matter what kind of vehicle you use. Even bikes will be obsolete if you can’t make tires or lubricant.
85% of crude oil is turned into refined fuels, to be burnt, for energy. If we simply go rid of that we would be drastically increasing the supply for non fuel needs. This will both be much better for the environment, and give us a much bigger buffer to create effective alternatives to things like oil based plastics, lubricants, and material processing components.
While I completely agree with you, consumers are slowly moving that way, regulations are slowly moving that way, and costs of fuel will eventually move that way quicker and quicker. Either the car industry listens because people will jump ship to the brands that embrace it or go to the potentially more sustainable and environmentally friendly public transportation. At this point it’s a smart competitive decision to start building the R&D, manufacturing, and supply chains for widespread EVs. You don’t want to be on the back foot when it does become necessity.
Yeah, there is transition but the transition has been slowing down due to lack of demand. People prefer hybrid/plugin than full electric. If the pain point hasn’t been solved, we wouldn’t see too much of a transition in this decade.
As an EV owner, and I approve this message
We need hydrogen cars and carless cities
People aren’t going to switch to something that costs a ton more to fuel and has fewer fill up locations. It doesn’t have any advantages over gas other than being low emissions, and that’s not enough to get people to switch. And electric only takes a bit longer nowadays to fill up.
Please not hydrogen… please!
@jaypatelani @ByteOnBikes why make a worse EV?
