I've said it before and I'll say it again: building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable. We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe (raw materials/labor needed for construction and maintenance, raw materials/labor/space needed for roads and parking lots, literal tons of waste--batteries, tires, steel, plastic, foam--, energy needed--most cars are driven by a single driver, pollution generated by all of this--e.g. mining byproducts and tire burn off).
To be completely explicit:
- If we're serious about meeting the 2030 "halve our emissions" and 2050 "zero our emissions" goals, EVs will not get there. Banning gas/diesel cars gets there. The only way that's even remotely possible is to heavily subsidize EVs (probably honestly just providing free swaps) and start making it way way more easier to get by w/o a car.
- The only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world. We've had freight trains and mass transit for centuries.
I get that whole economies are built around producing/maintaining cars and related infra, but it was wildly disastrous. We're well into sunk cost fallacy territory here, like, on a species level.
To be completely explicit:
- If we're serious about meeting the 2030 "halve our emissions" and 2050 "zero our emissions" goals, EVs will not get there. Banning gas/diesel cars gets there. The only way that's even remotely possible is to heavily subsidize EVs (probably honestly just providing free swaps) and start making it way way more easier to get by w/o a car.
- The only problem that self-driving cars will ever solve is where to put VC money in a zero interest rate world. We've had freight trains and mass transit for centuries.
I get that whole economies are built around producing/maintaining cars and related infra, but it was wildly disastrous. We're well into sunk cost fallacy territory here, like, on a species level.