Synopsis: People can find having their own car very rewarding.
I suggest it is real that car ownership is under threat, and this matters and EVs may play a key role in keeping car ownership alive into the future.
The main reason car ownership matters even if there are other transport solutions is that cars are more than just transport. Owning a car given the owner extra abilities that humans would have at one time considered superpowers.
A car is a form of mobile personal space. To provide an example of the role of cars as personal space, consider that a survey in 2016 found that 14% of Americans lost their virginity in a car, and 60% people surveyed had previously had sex in a car.
“Sex and cars have gone together since the car was invented,” USD psychologist and study leader Dr. Cindy Struckman-Johnson said in a press release.
How Many People Lose Their Virginity In The Car?
Although I suggest that supports the concept of the car as personal space, the concept of personal space is far more general. Often when young people get their first car, it can a zone that can be more personal to them than their own bedroom at home.
A person who commutes to work in their car, or even partially commutes to work in their car has a level of personal space during their time in the car that they won’t have on public transport. Parents sometimes find the time they spend with their children in the car as some of the best bonding time.
…… to be continued.
Car or truck: Personal vehicles and what’s in a name?
Many people now prefer to describe their personal vehicle as not a car but a truck. This is a suggestion that the term “car” can be used to include not just sports-cars, racing-cars, sedans and hatchbacks, but also SUVs and pickups/Utes while the vehicle is used for private activities for the vehicle owner, their friends and family and the possessions of the owner their friends and family.
I prefer to use the word car to be inclusive this way because always saying “car/truck” gets painful, and sounds like it also includes delivery vans and other purely commercial vehicles. As quoted below, the word ‘truck’ is also used to describe a category of vehicles very different to personal vehicles. I could every time say “car/personal truck” to be clearer, but it just gets quite long. Another alternative is “personal-vehicle”, but it is still long, can then sound like it includes bicycles when it is not my intention to include them, and sounds like forced “politically correct speak”.
I do not think the goal of people using the word “truck” to describe their personal vehicle is in order to force politically correct labels, so please, when I say “car” accept that I do include all “personal-vehicles” such as pickup-trucks, Utes, SUVs, 4WDs, hatchbacks and sedans, but just do not want to need to list them all.
Yes, I know some people might feel offended and say: “I don’t own a car, I own a truck!”, but as there is no one word to describe “cars and trucks owned for purposes that include being used as a car”, please excuse me just using the word “car”.
A car or automobile is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of cars say that they run primarily on roads, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport people, not cargo.
Wikipedia: car.
A truck or lorry is a motor vehicle designed to transport cargo, carry specialized payloads, or perform other utilitarian work.
Wikipedia: Truck.
Battling the anti-car campaigns.
Can EVs help fight the anti-car campaigns? The answer is “partly”.
There are two voices against cars:
- emissions.
- the push for higher density living in cities.
EVs only help combat the anti-car voice that does not have significant financial motives: emissions. I would argue that if the world population was sufficiently under 1 billion, we could possibly all continue to drive fossil fuelled cars without too much impact on CO2 levels. However, the world has over 8 billion people, and on that basis, I would argue if we transitioned to EVs, then could still have cars. Provided we transition to clean energy grids then “use case emissions” are reduced to just tyres and brake dust, the regenerative braking gives long brake wear that shows even brake dust is lowered. There still build emissions, but there is work to make building cars carbon neutral too.
But answering vehicle emissions problems still leaves the problem of the push for ever denser cities in a world where population growth is ending.
Why the push for ever denser populations within in cities?
Cynically, it could be suggested that the motivation is to line the pockets of property developers and financial institutions. Idealistically it would be house population increases driven by refugee intakes instead of workers and consumers lured by “people farming” into economically motivated immigration away from the countries that funded their education and may have even more need for those same workers.
We live in a world past the point of “peak child” and where all projections are for population growth to end, yet many cities have planning for never ending growth. Perhaps the growth of cities is needed due to the decline in rural populations in areas where land should not command such high premiums.
Governments not incessantly lobbied by property developers could possibly be more focused on ensuring the survival of smaller communities and provide paths to “affordable housing” that do not require shrinking the size of the house provided by the developers and assisting buyer fund ever higher mortgages so they can afford the ever-increasing prices of the smaller apartments and multiple occupancy developments. But then, perhaps if the focus was on housing that was affordable because it did not cost more, then it would rob governments of a source of economic growth and stop people being able to feel wealthier without while owning the same home and thus in some ways, no more wealth than before despite increased prices. But maybe that is too cynical?
Will it ever get to go as far as “people don’t need their own home?”
Probably not, or at least “not quite”. Some do suggest the future is micro homes, and that owning anything else is wasteful and won’t allow the world to support the population of consumer big business plans together with enough of other life for the planet to survive.
A very influential lobby successfully maintains policies that make housing density increase in areas where property developers can earn the greatest profits and drive-up housing prices so that financial institutions can also maximise their revenue even when the end result there are areas where homelessness is out of control and even young professionals cannot afford housing while other areas are driven to become ghost towns even though many people should now be able to work from anywhere.
Who has said: We don’t need to own our own cars?
Tony Seba.
I have a lot of respect for Tony Seba, so when he says something, I believe it needs very serious consideration.
“The day that we get level four, autonomous technology ready and approved by regulators, when that converges with on-demand, and electric transportation we will get what we call transportation as a service (TAAS).”
Seba says EV longevity and autonomy will cause global new car sales to plunge 75%
“Some call it Robo taxi. Essentially, when that happens the cost per mile of transportation is going to drop by anywhere from 10 to 20 times.”
“So even if gasoline automakers gave away their cars, that’s still gonna be a lot more expensive than the cost of transport as a service.”
“So for most people who can barely pay their bills, it won’t make any sense to own a car,” said Seba.
“Do I spend $50,000 over the next five years to own a car? Or do I pay $100 a month for a subscription to transportation as a service?”
A big question here, is what percentage of people are expected to fit into the “can barely pay their bills” category, and what are these bills they can barely pay? While it may be true that most people fit into the category of “can barely pay their bills”, hopefully it is not true that these bills are for all just covering the minimum possible for survival and some of their costs included leisure and enjoying life. If this is the case, just maybe, for some of them, their car is not just transport, but part of their leisure and enjoying life.
Elon Musk.
I find Elon Musk an enigma. And his “fun police” position on EVs is another example. Consider his “master plan 3” presentation:
- He states the more autonomous cars are, the more people don’t people need to own cars.
- Despite his desire to increase global population, he states we will move from 2 million ICEVs to only 1.4 million EVs, which implies over 30% of people who own a car today will be left without a car.
Updates.
- 2024 Feb 6 th : This page replaced previous outdated head of topic page.
