This page (and the video) look at key questions on the future of cars & EVs: Will robotaxis mean really no one will want to own a car anymore? Even if people do still want cars, will EVs just die out or eventually take over? What about hydrogen, e-fuels, or the countries like the USA dropping any climate agenda? EV have improved a lot, but need to do more before they are fully suitable for _most_ people. If EVs & infrastructure are just not yet ready for most people, what's the next step?
The climate is always changing. The good news has been that Earth's surface went from molten rock to now supporting the bloom of visible life we see today as the Phanerozoic Eon, but the bad news is the bloom, and current wonderful conditions are just a brief moment, as the surface will naturally return to being too hot for any life to survive. Plus, as watching a volcano shows, things have cooled little inside Earth and while Earth currently has a relatively cool thin crust, relatively no thicker than an eggshell, it is still almost entirely a very hot planet.
And yes, environment and climate are always changing. Even though we are creating quite a mess right now, realistically it's nature and natural environment and climate changes, not us humans, that will end all life one Earth. This look at the big picture of the history of environment and climate reveals while "Mother Earth" does seem quite nurturing right now, this planet is normally hostile to all life beyond "just slime" made up of microbes like those we kill we must kill to sterilize medical equipment. What we are enjoying is the equivalent of the brief bloom of life in the desert after rain. Yes, our technology brings risks and may "poke the bear", but without technology, when that "grizzly bear of natural climate change" wakes from its current short hibernation, we, and the species we cherish could perish. Following "the flip" not just us but all other complex life and even the microbes, eventually are doomed. For us humans, the threat is real and immediate. Or is it that, natural changes to climate, like "bears", are part of nature and nature would never harm us?
This is the lead webpaper for all content related to personal vehicles, cars and trucks and their future. While most content is on the EVs and hybrids that I see as the future of transition of personal vehicles, the overall focus is on the future of car ownership. Many, even including Elon Musk, claim that in the future, people won't need to own a car. I suggest that sentiment misses that cars don't get gets us from A to B, but instead are places we spend the part of our lives while getting from A to B, and sometimes are even our home base when simply at B instead of A. In fact, a future where only the wealthy can own their own vehicles is heading towards the direction of reducing personal living space and "caged humans" where it could also be suggested "people won't need their own home". While site embraces moving to EVs, but no the agenda that EVs most be only ever smaller city cars, or better still just electric bicycles. EVs should allow the vehicles we want to own to be sustainable, that is provided we don't also succumb to living in cities that seek ever denser population densities.
I started out wondering how much temperatures have risen so far, what is the best estimate for when will reach +1.5°C , and how bad is +1.5°C anyway. I expected that finding the first two answers would be easy, but it was not. I found the answers, and why they were not easy to find. I found that with warming at +1.0 in Paris in 2015, +1.5 logically seemed 50 years away, but in 2021 just 6 years later, we are halfway there at +1.25°C. Much changed during the Covid-19 distraction, and at this rate +1.5°C is set to be here by 2026, not the 2050 predicted at Paris.
