this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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Fuck Cars

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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

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[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 days ago

Unless you have sustainable electricity production and battery recycling set up, EVs are not substantially better for the environment compared to ICE cars. Raw materials for lithium batteries have an enormous ecological footprint. Energy transmission & charging losses mean that if you're using fossil fuels (especially coal) to produce electricity, in terms of raw CO₂/km EVs are only 10-30% more efficient than gasoline-powered cars. Doesn't matter how much pollution control you slap on there, greenhouse gases are kind of the main problem here and carbon capture on fossil power plants is mostly a greenwashing scam and doesn't work.

Sure, EVs are a bit better for the environment in almost all cases, but if you compare that with efficient public transit it's a bloodbath.

That's before you even start considering other issues with cars, like all the microplastics released from tires, the noise (yes, EVs are also really noisy at speeds >30km/h), the financial and environmental cost of covering our cities in asphalt, the societal damage caused by car-centric infrastructure, the amount of parking space they need, the psychological stress they cause to everyone around them, and finally just how fucking dangerous they are. If you consider all of those, it's insane that we still allow people to bring private vehicles into densely populated areas at all. Cities should not have private cars, period, doesn't matter if they're battery-powered or self-driving or whatever. In fact I'd go as far as to say almost no human settlements with developed infrastructure should have them.

Cars are good for one thing: traveling medium distances in places with little or no infrastructure. For everything else better modes exist.