I mean, while we still have so much car centric infrastructure in the states, they can be a useful transition.

I say this as someone who primarily commutes by bicycle btw. Public transit in my area is piss poor. Unpredictable buses, no light rail. Hell there aren't even sidewalks everywhere.

My wife recently got a fully electric car, and I support that move. She is not ready to go car free. But at least we are not necessarily burning fossil fuels to power trips to the grocery store. I think the closest power plants to us are nuclear and hydroelectric. Im sure there's a coal plant in the mix too tho.

Would never give elon a cent of our money though

I can't buy a metro line for my city, I can make sure my next car is electric. Buying an electric car is morally superior to buying a gas car.

It's better to transition private cars now because that's going to take years in and of itself and it's relatively easy and fast to swap out the centralized power plants for greener options later. Swap out one dirty power plant for a green plant and everything electric connected to it is instantly greener in turn.

Even if the US went all in on public infrastructure today, it would still take decades

Not giving any money to Musk though, there are other options.

The main attractor to me is that with an electric car, you could theoretically be energy independent. Same goes with an ebike.

Eg, Solar -> battery -> EV/ebike

No need to be relying on rotten dinosaurs dug up out of wherever, with a million middle men and taxes.

To paraphrase Alan Fisher, electric cars fail to solve the biggest problem with cars: The fact that they're still cars.

I generally agree with this sentiment: fuck cars in general, but we can't discount the reduction in oil demand associated with EVs. Transportation accounts for 50%ish of total emissions. That's a big piece of the pie in terms of emissions reduction. Further, storage and reduction don't translate at a 1:1 ratio. If you reduce, you're much better off than storing in terms of carbon.

Do we need a much better transportation system? Absofuckingloutley. EVs can help transition, at least in the short term but I see hybrid of trains/buses and micromobility as the path forward

The car industry didn't want EVs. Much of it still doesn't

buying a tesla feeds the orange

You think the car industry needs saved? How so? Gas or electric, there's never been a lull in people purchasing cars. Quite the opposite, most of the time. It's not like cars were on a production decline before ev's started rolling in and saved the day with the few percentage of car shoppers buying them.

Honestly moral superiority needs to get taken out of climate change as a whole. It's a global issue that needs political solutions. Nobody's individual actions are gonna change their nation's heating systems from gas, grids energy make up to solar, or billionaires to climate activists.

Seems like it's an outdated opinion, or a pro-ICE car one. Fossil fuel is here to stay and a lot of car maker is slowing down the electric car adaptation and goes into hybrid instead. EV will not save the car industry unless countries ban ICE car, which might be a few decades away globally from actually materialise. There's still infrastructure lacking for people to charge their car, there's still battery fire for them to worry about, and there's still range anxiety.

And despite all that, people who decided to purchase an EV 5 or so years ago does help to push the thing to wider market, and that's a good thing. Of course it's better if people swap to multimodal commuting, but right now a lot of places doesn't have that privilege.

In general, EV alone isn't gonna save the planet, there's shit tons of thing to do before we move toward that goal, and EV is part of that thing.

Buy Tesla's what?

Not everyone runs on moral superiority.

As an EV owner, and I approve this message

Cars, car infrastructure, people preferring to live far out and drive to work -- those are choices that can be made individually and collectively in a society-respecting way.

Driving an ICE car is a choice that affects the entire planet. When you do that, you're doing something immoral no matter what.

Driving electric essentially illuminates the most immoral aspect of the entire driving your car thing. It is a moraly superior choice, and you should feel good about it.

And now that we removed "if we all drive the world will end" from the discussion, we can in a civilized manner discuss and decide how many cars and where do we want.

--

Oh, sorry, this is lemmy, lemme quickly correct myself: burn every Tesla you see to stick it to the billionaires! Revolution starts today!