Another example of how, if you had to design a vehicle for passenger city/suburban use, you would never ever ever come up with an ICE sedan, or to be honest even an electrical vehicle of "normal" proportions.
Pretty sure the car is the most harmful invention of the 20th century. The damage it has done to the environment, our health, and social fabric is hard to grok.
A couple edits for clarification:
- I'm talking about using cars to transport individuals to work, school, lunch, errands, etc
- Cars are very harmful to health. Most obviously, they kill a lot of people. There's over one million road deaths worldwide per year[0]. (Covid killed 4M). Less obviously, they are terrible for health. Living next to busy roadways is linked to increased dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases. This has nothing to do with CO2--it's the rubber and metal and not addressed by Teslas or whatever.
- Cars make people dumber. Students who move to schools downwind of busy roads have lower test scores [1].
- Less obvious is the damage to social fabric. It's not just a distance thing: it's an estrangement thing. People in cars skip the places they move through as opposed to inhabiting them. Think about some busy thoroughfare at night near your home. Does it feel safe?
- Think about Houston. Think about Mumbai. Think about Lagos.
- Getting rid of cars does not mean everyone has to use public transport. In fact that was my point. You can design a vehicle that takes you quickly from a -> b that doesn't weigh 2 tons and uses 18m^2 at rest.
- Getting rid of cars does not mean getting rid of ambulances ffs.
But my main issue isn't how bad this all is: it's how unnecessary it is. As a species we are more than capable (as evidenced by the OP!) of building a variety of modes of transport that are better in most every way (utility, externalities, price) to cars.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/pollution...