not sure if it hits like it did in my head
Electric cars are here to save the car industry, not the environment.
The most environmentally friendly car is the car you already have, and the most environmentally friendly (also safest, healthiest, quietest, just in general the most considerate) way to get from point A to point B is by walking, biking, bus, or train.
The only time EV saves the environment is when all of the following are met:
- your old car is completely gone,
- there is zero way to get to where you need to be without a car,
- and you have been fighting for good transport and safe bike lane all along.
I bought an electric car because it was a better car for my needs. I got a good deal on it. Electric cars have fewer, simpler moving parts. They require fewer oil changes and don’t have to deal with heat dissipation. I can also have it plugged into my house each night, which means I always have a “full tank” every morning. I can set the heat or air conditioning to come on on a schedule because it doesn’t produce carbon monoxide. The car is much quieter and drives a lot smoother.
They have a lot of benefits, but they don’t exactly save the environment. Lithium mining is very destructive to the local environment and it’s done in countries with questionable ethics around worker health and safety. Most experts agree that over the lifespan of a car, electric cars are better for the world environment than gas vehicles, but if you really want to make an impact on the environment, taking public transit or biking or walking or other forms of micro-mobility would actually make a way bigger impact. And if those kinds of things are difficult where you live, you should really be supporting public policy to make that better.
Electric cars are to save automobile industry profits. Not the planet.
If you want to save the planet, then ride a bicycle.
Sounds great if you don’t have to commute many miles 2 times per day in an area with no public transit.
All just to keep the roof over your head
Two failures do not make a right.
The point above stands. EVs do little for the environment. Compared to sensible options like transit and biking and walking they are marginally better, but hm hardly at all.
They reduce emissions in a neighborhood, in driveways and such, and they reduce sound pollution, which is great for local creatures.
They shift power generation to more efficient platforms, rather than messy, poorly maintained gas engines.
Battery production and recycling is a major issue.
For those who cannot walk or bike, an affordable ev is a great choice
Yeah the long commute is of course an immuteable fact of life and cannot be changed
Seems to me like having to drive many miles to maintain a job that can pay enough to maintain your fairly far afield home (assuming the home costs less because it’s not in the same geography as the office) is a failure of the system as a whole and the company for not making their office work better for their workers.
I mean, unless you have a storefront or regularly have to go to specific places as part of your job, like lawyers going to the court house, then why tf does the company pay for very expensive offices in the middle of a metro area? Put the offices where the workers can actually live near it.
I work in IT, I go to the office to stare at a PC for 8 hours. Something I can literally do anywhere, but instead of IDK, working from home or having distributed offices spaces so people don’t have to drive as far, my companies only office is in the middle of a major Metro’s downtown in a high rise office for a massive amount of money. So now I have to pay, out of my pocket and time, to drive through downtown traffic, to a parking spot that costs me far too much monthly, so I can simply be physically there to do a job that only requires a PC and an internet connection.
It’s all fucking stupid… And every company seems to do this. Nobody ever comes to our offices and there’s literally no reason for them to be where they are, or for me to be there.
… or walk?
Fewer CO2 emissions is a good goal if you are going to buy a car. Keeping it as long as possible is a better goal.
… or walk?
Both have their role. Walking is appropriate for local short trips, while bicycles allow you to cover more distance, and is in turn superseded by transit in potential distance covered, while still being a low emissions mode of transportation.
Fewer CO2 emissions is a good goal if you are going to buy a car. Keeping it as long as possible is a better goal.
If the infrastructure allows for it where you live, going car-free is an even better goal for reducing CO2-emissions, and is only one of a long list of benefits of not traveling by car.
Barring that, voting and influencing politicians that can build infrastructure enabling more car-free lives is a good step in the right direction.
Hard to carry a TV on a bicycle, or transport loads to the recycling centre, or drop my kids off at school or any one of a thousand things that occur day to day.
Our world redesigned itself with the invention of cars. Trying to exist without them is very hard for your average family, especially those who live outside cities.
If you live in a backwards place this may be so. I can do all of those things without a car.
It’s a town of 90k people. The kind of town that the vast majority of people in the UK live in.
Just out of curiosity how can you transport something large and bulky, that isn’t allowed on public transport, let’s say furniture, or the remains of a shed you dismantled or any one of a hundred inconvenient loads that occur during your life without a car?
how often do you seriously carry a tv? and believe it or not, most kids can ride a bike, or even walk!
Great, well I have a six year old that needs to get to his school which is about a mile and a half away and I need to get to work 20 mins after which is about three miles in the other direction.
I then also need to do his pickup during my lunch break.
Most people’s lives don’t work without a car because that’s not the society that car ownership created.
The people who broke the testla are the ones who murdered the tree by putting asphalt right up to its trunk.
Either the asphalt shohldnt be there or a smaller tree should have been used.
Nonetheless it’s clear someone has asphalted right up to the trunk and that should have never occurred.
What a weak tree, in my city the trees pretend the asphalt isn’t there and the roots grow right through it
nature: “you should take the train instead”
The train doesn’t stop at the recycling centre. Nor does it stop at my childrens’ schools. Ditto my office, the supermarket, IKEA, the house of the person I just bought weed from.
The layout of our towns expanded with the ubiquity of cars. Services agglomerated and became situated where land was cheap rather than central.
Bikes and light mass transit have their use cases but removing cars is not feasible for the majority of households
The planet is subscribed to !fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
