Electric Cars

I hate this car-centric society, but let’s be real cars aren’t going anywhere. Moving away from fossil fuels is a good thing. Not sure why we’re criticizing progress here.

It's because on the modern internet, everyone is all-or-nothing when it comes to their chosen issue. Nuance has become unacceptable.
This community in particular can get a little out of touch at times. In North America in particular, even if every level of government agreed to begin working towards a car free society immediately, we'd still be facing a decades long construction campaign as entire towns and cities would have to be restructured. In the meantime, a shift to electric vehicles is something that can drastically help the global warming issue, and can be implemented in less than a decade.
In reality, we should be shifting to electric cars in the sort term, while we work towards eliminating the need for them in the long term.
Also, I'm convinced that the brake dust/tire wear particulates talking point is the result of oil industry astroturfing. The brake dust thing especially is actually better on electric cars, since regenerative braking reduces the amount of brake wear.
- Higher weight and higher torque means tires wear faster on EVs. That’s physics, and the theory is backed up by real world evidence.
- Uno reverse : I really dont think these are all or nothing criticisms. If anything, you're engaging in that. Just because we criticize the proposed progress doesn't mean we oppose it. You have no room for nuance in your criticism of our criticism!
- organic tires now!
Its because EVs are being marketed as a green solution, not a stepping stone. If a car must exist it might as well be electric but we should be asking how do we reduce the cars that exist and their frequency of use. Building electrified transit and keeping ICE cars would as a whole be more beneficial than just converting all cars to EVs.
- Building electrified transit and keeping ICE cars would as a whole be more beneficial than just converting all cars to EVs.
  This choice you've presented is extremely misleading. The build out of electrified public transportation and the shift from ICE to EV cars are not in any way related choices. If the government chooses to build more public transportation, that has no effect on whether or not EVs replace ICE cars.
- Building electrified transit and keeping ICE cars would as a whole be more beneficial than just converting all cars to EVs.
  I highly, highly doubt it. I lived in the country with pretty good transit, but exclusively ICE cars. It was not good, not at all. Better than cars only, still not good. Good transit doesn't eliminate cars, unfortunately, and always breathing car emissions is bad, very, very, very bad.
  The only solution is to do both. Right now I live in the city with very good public transport, but still sprawling car infrastructure, the only difference is, there is a robust car emission rules, so most cars around are EVs or hybrids. It's so, so, so much better than the first variation, it's not even close.
  I would prefer city getting rid of most of the car-centric infrastructure still, but now I have a chance to see this day, and not die of a lung cancer at a ripe age of 55
My 2 favorite cities that is lived in were San Francisco and Rio de Janeiro. Apart from both of them being gorgeous and fun, one of the best things was that I did not need a car.
Because it's progress that needed to happen 30 years ago. While we've been transitioning to electric cars, progress also needed to happen on every other issue but it doesn't happen because we're all in on electric cars instead of doing something about car dependency as a whole. It's not moving forward, it's moving sideways.
- Speaking from the US, we’re clearly not yet all in on EVs and we just killed funding for transit and intercity rail. And they’re trying to remove fuel efficiency standards altogether. We are 30 years ago and regressing fast.
  Transit and intercity rail are receding into some future utopian fever dream but some of us can still choose EVs
Yup, which is why the policies to ban the sale of new gas powered vehicle is a good thing.
Moving away from fossil fuels is a good thing.
Yes, but not if it promotes destructive behaviours such as increased car dependency.
EVs are like low-calorie sweeteners: they do nothing to stop obesity, and actually encourage more eating (and more obesity).
- I'd argue that at least where I live, the amount of electric vehicles that has appeared over the precious decade is very clearly a majority bikes, scoots and other personal transport, instead of a car.
  But yes I know for this conversation you meant EV as in electric cars.
  And while the rent-a-scoots are pretty obnoxious at times, they do support the public transport insanely well in a city like mine, which has good bike paths and good public transport, but sometimes you'll find yourself a few kilometres from the best connection or smth and take a scoot. (Although less so now, public transport just improved drastically last month, city started so many new cross-city routes, fking awesome for me.)
- Yes, but not
  Yes, but yes actually. It's not how the question exists in the world, it's not and it's never "more car-centrism with EV or less car-centrism with FFV". It's usually two related but very separate questions and you need to fight for right answers for both.
  low-calorie sweeteners
  Also, not how that works.
- You want electric buses? You want battery electric trains? Electric airplanes?
  Cars are your path to research and development for these modes of transportation.
Cars will always have their place. However, that place doesn’t need to be “everywhere”.
Thank you for saying that
We're not criticising progress. Moving away from ICE cars is a good thing. Moving away from cars when and where possible is an additional, better thing. This is !fuckcars@lemmy.world where people tend to look beyond moving from a worse car to a better car.
Moving away from fossil fuels is a good thing.
That depends on where the electricity comes from. Instead of ‘EV’ we should really be calling these things Natural Gas cars.
- The grid could be powered by 100% coal and an EV would still be better than an ICE car. The efficiency difference between car motors and power plants is staggering.
People can only think in binary terms.

Car culture evangelist in fuckcars community missing the point as always.

The point is that EVs are not a good solution to the problem with cars - they are just a better car. This individualizes what is a collective problem.

My city is adding six new lanes for cars in the coming years, meanwhile there are already intersections that a person has to jog to get across in time. Cars have their use, but it's far far far less than people realise.

Valorizing EVs leads to perpetuating car centric designs, which is a negative across many dimensions - not only ecologically.

All that being said, better car is still better than a worse car. I live near a big road, and it kinda sucks. Back then when all cars were emitting poison from a tailpipe instead of only some doing it, it didn't just suck, it was a fucking nightmarish hell, dirty, loud, smelly, poisonous dark hell, and some people from my family died prematurely because of that.
I don't think the community in my city can persuade carbrains to quit caring any time soon. They can convince them to start with being slightly less damaging, for starters.
- it's also important to remember that electric cars are heavier (you know, batteries) which increases road wear, tyre wear, and makes them more dangerous in collisions (and means they need yet more battery to push the extra weight, very fun).
  Electric cars are really only strictly better if they're also made smaller and lighter, electric cars are great but we should be treating 2-seaters with like 200km range as the norm.
- Yes, a better car is a better car. That's perfectly reasonable harm reduction logic.
  I just would rather people not forget that that's all it is, and know that there are much better communal solutions. Even if they seem utopian, they're actually very sensible and pragmatic.
  Materially speaking, we could start building a better world tomorrow morning. We don't have to wait for tech to save us.

Electric vehicles

eliminate tailpipe emissions
cut brake dust emissions in half
pollute less as we transition to renewable energy
let us work toward elimination the huge polluting industries for gasoline refining and distribution
let us shrink the huge polluting industries of oil extraction and refining
are a huge step toward slowing the growth of climate change.

While I completely agree transit, and walkable cities are much better, EVs are not nothing. More importantly, given the amount of time to build transit and walkable cities, EVs get us many of the advantages NOW

While those are great improvements over fossil fuel based cars, they also exasperate existing issues.
Almost all of these EVs are in the SUV category. These vehicles take up more space on the road and parking lots. This results in less capacity for our road systems causing traffic engineers to incorrectly add more and more lanes to roads. Additionally combined with parking minimums, more and more land is developed into parking lots, which in term increases pollution and increases the heat island effect.
The increased weight and instant torque both causes increased tire dust (as another commenter mentioned) as well as accelerated wear to the roads. The high power figures results in inattentive selfish drivers being able to reach high speeds quickly adding risk for pedestrians.
I understand that the SUV craze existed before EVs were popular however as EVs are normalized it'll only further enforce people buying oversized dangerous sub-4s 0-60 bricks.
Yeah, this comic is putting perfect in the way of good.
Not to mention, there are people who do need vehicles, the trades being one example.
They also increase tyre wear particles due to their greater weight and torque
Also important to remember that not everywhere can be made walkable or makes sense to make public transit. You don't want a bus route that picks up 2 people every day. That's just worse than those 2 people having their own electric car.
A lot of people in the world are living in rural places where public transit is worse for the environment and bikes aren't a realistic way to get from a to b. In these places electric vehicles are the only better alternative.
- Not as many people in the world as you think. By definition of remote parts of the world, very small amount of people actually live there.
  I lived in a remote part of the world in the village of barely 50 people. We had a small bus coming through it twice a day, and if you needed to go to the town, you just went there in the morning and returned in the evening in the bus. Some people had cars they were using once every couple of weeks, but most people didn't. Bikes and walking was the most used form of transportation. Most of the people there were there for the sole reason of being far away and not needing to rush to the nearest city often, that's kind of the whole thing.
  The shit you're describing is mainly uniquely American problem, people living in bumfuck nowhere but commuting to town using their gasguzzler, not only it's not universal, it's actually very not normal.
- Yes and no. The problem is too much of the world is unnecessarily built that way. This is one of the fundamental reasons why it will take so long to implement: we need to change where people prefer to live.
  Note I said “prefer” before y’all get up in arms about forcing people to move. We’ve spent way too many years giving rural people a lot of the same infrastructure as urban people and it’s just not sustainable. The thing is that even relatively small towns can have denser walkable areas and useful transit. Without forcing anyone to uproot, we ought to be able to get a good 80% or more of the population to not require a car.
let us work toward elimination the huge polluting industries for gasoline refining and distribution
Unlikely. If we keep doubling-down on vehicle infrastructure, the remaining ICE vehicles will see greater vehicle-miles traveled (VMT). It's not just the number of cars out there, it's the number of cars multiplied by the distances that they travel.
let us shrink the huge polluting industries of oil extraction and refining
Unlikely. The industrial processes and materials used to produce EVs use copious quantities of petrochemicals.
are a huge step toward slowing the growth of climate change.
Unlikely. EVs still need the same infrastructure as ICE vehicles, and the chemical process of curing concrete alone is one of the major sources of CO₂ emissions. As well, the ecological destruction wrought by automobile infrastructure is a significant contributor to climate change.
- EVs still need the same infrastructure as ICE vehicles
  Hmmm, I haven’t taken mine to a gas station in two years. I must be way overdue.
  Now I know you’re moving the goalposts to roads when I was talking gasoline industry, but let me point out where I started
  While I completely agree transit, and walkable cities are much better, EVs are not nothing.
  More importantly I do live in a partly walkable town. I do use transit when I can. And yes I have the privilege of living in one of the few parts of the US where intercity rail is decent
They still kill animals and people, so... Toot the horn elsewhere.

A report from the Pew Charitable Trust found that 78 percent of ocean microplastics are from synthetic tire rubber. These toxic particles often end up ingested by marine animals, where they can cause neurological effects, behavioral changes, and abnormal growth.

Meanwhile, British firm Emissions Analytics spent three years studying tires. The group found that a single car’s four tires collectively release 1 trillion “ultrafine” particles for every single kilometer (0.6 miles) driven. These particles, under 100 nanometers in size, are so tiny that they can pass directly through the lungs and into the blood. They can even cross the body’s blood-brain barrier. The Imperial College London has also studied the issue, noting that “There is emerging evidence that tire wear particles and other particulate matter may contribute to a range of negative health impacts including heart, lung, developmental, reproductive, and cancer outcomes.”

Source

Cool beans, I've got "Tire Brain".
Stuff like this doesn't shock me anymore. I just assume the worst case for everything and I've already accepted that we are fucked. I'm just hoping to die without pain.

This, to me, just seems like it's trying to give permissions to ICE car owners not to change anything.

It definitely is not that. However, it is a reminder that, even with electric vehicles, there is a serious, environmental and social impact.
This, to me, shows cars are more damaging than what just comes out of their tail pipes. Maybe the illustration could have included impacts of cycling and transit to help illustrate the point it is trying to make by comparing the impacts.
- I think that would have made a huge difference... just showcase how literally none of these concerns are relevant with a bicycle.
They don't need permission. They won't change anything unless their material conditions make it likely for them to change. That is lower EV prices, lower maintenance, better utility, good public transit, etc. They would buy a RAM 1500 if they wanted to whether they saw this meme or not. It's unlikely that someone was sitting thinking whether to go with an EV or ICE, sees this meme and goes like - nah fuck that, I'm getting a gas guzzler. Meanwhile the ones that are active in the spaces that advocate for car alternatives had a bit of fun reading it, and got a small boost in motivation to keep pestering our politicians to expand transit.
- I'm not sure if I'm convinced on the efficacy of a post like this to boost political motivation, but I am glad it was fun at least

Ah, well if an improvement isn't perfect, we should definitely reject it and continue using the worst possible version until a perfect one is created

You forgot your /s.

Electric cars also reduce particulate dust. Because of regenerative braking they need to brake less often and less agressive. There was a study published just kadt week.

Also noise pollution. Under 35 mph, most car noise is engine noise.
- eeeh, i don't think this is a particularly noticable benefit.
  The amount of noise given off by cars at those speeds is just an annoyance, the real problem is the tyre noise at high speeds and that's only made worse by electric cars.
  They recently lowered the speed on a through-road near me from 70km/h to 60km/h and it made a pretty huge difference in how tolerable it is to be anywhere near the road, the difference between a combustion and an electric car driving on a residential street is so much smaller that it's not even funny.
- So much this. Car noise is a huge problem.
But they increase particulate tire dust due to being heavier.
- Yes, but it seems from the study that the increase in tire dust is smaller than the refuction in brake dust
Ooh cool, would love to see that paper.
- Here you go: https://www.eiturbanmobility.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/41-EIT-Emissions-Report-5a-Digital-1.pdf
  Battery Electric Vehicles reduce brake dust by up to 83%
- Im curious if the additional weight of EVs causes more tire wear and ends up negating any savings from the brake dust. We also have to consider manufacturing and disposal of both vehicles to be truly fair.

It doesn't solve all the problems, so instead, let's solve none of the problems!

Get an electric car if you want, but you should still support society moving away from needing them in the first place, no?
Imagine a school cafeteria is serving kids the option of 5 hershey's chocolate bars, or a slice of pizza. You can acknowledge the pizza is better, but you should still be asking where the god damn vegetables are.
- That's pretty much exactly the point I was trying to make. Incremental improvements are better than no improvements.
  People shit on electric cars because they aren't the perfect solution, ignoring the fact that they are better than what we have now.
  It took us 150 years to get in to this mess. We aren't going to fix it completely overnight.
How dare you not install your own commuter train out to your rural property.
- How many people living on their rural property build their own roads to get there, as compared to relying on taxpayer subsidies?

Most of the fuckwads in this comment section missed the point of the post

The point is to get in your daily bitching quota lol
Yeah. They are actually furthering the point by imagining there is no solution apart from EVs and ICE cars. Also, have they seen the name of the conmunity lol!

Had the right idea but lost me at the end. Better is better. We can both electrify and work to move away from automobiles at the same time. We should not divide a group of people with common interest in a better tomorrow. To do so is how we lose.

Arent roads useful for more things than cars? Biking on a road that is filled with small rocks is not fun

Streets can also allow kids play if there arent cars on them

roads designed for cars are massively larger than roads that aren't made for cars, a standard modern car-centric road would be a pretty major and significant thing for most of human history.
A single standard car lane is a generously wide bike path.
A road is more than a smooth, flat surface. A road that's designed for cars has to have an extensive roadbed of gravel and soil laid down, as well as a thick base of pavement on which to lay the surface, because of the weight of vehicles. A bike path, or a street where children can play, is comparatively speaking just some asphalt.
Definitely don't need streets to play. A couple paved areas for basketball, skating, etc is nice - but that's just a park.
ish, but without cars you don't need a 20 lane highway. and streets can also less lanes,

On one hand, I like that EVs are leaps and bounds above gas guzzlers. On the other, it does still reinforce our current car culture.

EVs would be an objective improvement if people actually bought small sensible ones, but of course that would entail actually changing their lifestyle and thus it cannot happen.
The only good car is a kei car.

Electric cars are the best solution available for people who live in car centric areas and can't afford to build their own train line.

We should also be trying to get walkable neighborhoods and adequate public transport, but I will very rarely tell someone not to replace their car with electric. It really is much better than the available alternatives.

i have an electric car and electric bicycle (american; suburb - forced car use). having an electric car is so much better than my old regular one not only because of emissions, but i have solar panels at home. free "gas" and never having to go to a gas station is super underrated.

i bike ~90% of the time, anyways, but its nice to never have to do any of that stuff. the car is 2.5 years old and it has ~7.5k miles on it... most of which was my wife driving my car when hers broke, heh.

cars will never be green. While cars have their use, we should limit the usage of 1 person per car.

This cartoon is almost easy to mistake for satire making fun of the anti-car people.

Y'all have to face the reality that cars are not going away. The roads will outlast every human being that reads these words. People will continue to travel on those roads in vehicles of some kind. EVs are the best option we have yet for making the roads' usage have less environmental impact.

You do realize those roads are only driveable because of extensive maintaince. If we stopped maintaining a specific road and built tracks instead, many people would choose the tram/train as the road would be too rough to travel at any decent speed after a few years. The infrastructure we build and maintain directly impact the mode people use. And currently many places exclussively build and maintain roads, often not even including the option of a sidewalk.
- Yeah that's pretty funny because I've driven on unmaintained roads for decades. In my area we are lucky if they do any maintenance when there are road problems. Sometimes people have to clear trees from the road after storms, and it may be done by the county or a random guy with a chainsaw.
  Also I learned to drive on gravel roads, drifting around corners to learn the innate balance of maintaining stability without traction. Even if the paved roads were ground down to gravel, we would still drive on them.

Good luck AmeriKa, you are way behind the 1st World and the fucking MAGAts will make it worse.

I've started listening to "Everything Electric" podcast and am increasingly getting irritated by the idea that the only solution is everyone getting rid of their ice car and getting an electric one.

I can't work out thats because it fits my rhetoric/approach (got rid of my car for an electric moped) or if I really believe it.

The biggest motivator for cars and wide roads are weekend getaways; there are good options for commute and long-distance travel. Maybe, if you ban private car purchases and have good rail connectivity, people'd get by on rentals.

Now do the same for trains.

Or do you think they don't kill animals / require resources?

Maybe perfect is the enemy of good?

Excellent whataboutism.
- Even if we did want to humor them. 1 or 2 train tracks to cross is much easier for an animal than a 6 lane road of mixed traffic. Trains are all chained together so rails see a train every 5-15 minutes at most whereas a road could see hundreds of cars all spaced apart and going different speeds in that same time frame. Trains will still hit some animals, but it far less per person/good moved per mile of travel than a car.
  As for their resources argument yes they still use resources, but it is less resources spent overall so still a better option.

I was watching How It's Made recently, and they did asphalt. The components were crushed granite in three different sizes, sand, and some "cement" that is a byproduct of oil refining. And I'm sitting there watching it thinking, "Wow. We're doing this on purpose."

Asphalt is at least the most recycled material we use. I guess except water technically speaking.
Doing what? As far as road surfaces go, asphalt is the most environmentally friendly (other than just having only dirt roads). Concrete emits CO2 as an inherent part of the process, and a brick road would be hilariously expensive, and non-durable. Asphalt also has the distinction of being the most recycled material on the planet. And not just in a "10% get recycled and everything is less" sense. Almost all asphalt ends up being recycled into more asphalt.
- Doing what?
  We're in the !fuckcars community. What do you think? We're building more roads instead of more rails. We're building wider roads instead of using more buses and bicycles.
  Edit: And to be clear, we're doing all of that by putting industrial waste on top of our land.

A study from tech company Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University sought to answer the question of just how much energy is needed to make AI images a viewable reality. Their findings show that a single image generation can consume as much as half of a smartphone's battery charge, approximately 0.011 kilowatt hours of energy

https://www.slashgear.com/1696332/ai-image-generation-how-much-energy-used/

Edit: wait is this not ai?

Obviously not, AI art does not have a cohesive style

Busses and trains cause many of those same issues. What is the message here? Fuck all transportation and just stay at home?

Those issues from trains and busses are less impact per person than a private automobile. Also pretty sure they don't need to salt train tracks and trains don't use tires (except a few very rare examples).
- And those issues from EVs are also less impactful than ICE.
  Maybe not everything is black and white?