Because I’ve been mansplaining for days now that there are far more than just three good reasons for electric cars (local CO2 freedom, decentralised storage system of the future and independence in operation from fossil despots) I made a thread at Bluesky.
Since I encounter this belief in technology again and again here on LinkedIn, I think it makes sense to take a look at the few details I list. They are by no means all the disadvantages that privately owned cars (whether electric or fossil) mean for people – and for a future worth living.
As it always prevents good discussions:
-> Yes, some people will always be dependent on a car.
-> Yes, the only way the car should go is all-electric!
-> No! Not all people who own one or more cars today need them.
-> No! The car is not a freedom for many as they are forced to drive because alternatives have been taken away or never offered to them.
Feel free to leave these aspects out of the comments 🙂
Feel free to add your thoughts on it!
And distribute.
The only way forward for personal mobility is electric, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t also have to significantly reduce the number of cars on the road, that we have to focus government investment on alternatives such as buses, trains and cycle paths, that we have to stop all car subsidies and that we have to share as many of the cars that remain as possible. Currently, these are real estate. They stand in the way of people who deserve a good quality of life on their doorstep (and sometimes had it).
Figure from Germany: average occupancy rate is 1.4 people for a 45-minute journey. For professional commuters, this figure is even lower at just 1.075. At least someone is holding the steering wheel!
We could even get below 1 if we design autonomous driving like car mobility, but that’s another topic.
So, since men challenged me:
Let’s see what problems remain when cars become fully electric. Which they urgently need to become, since only this form of propulsion is highly efficient, without local CO2 emissions and makes us dependent on villains who sell us oil and gas. Even better! We can generate the energy that still comes from fossil sources ourselves. Pure independence – locally.
And that brings us to the first problem that will not go away:
Unfortunately, killing is a good starting point.
Killing from cars, which many people put in the ‘natural cause of death’ drawer in their minds when it comes to the question of what causes death. Yet cities like Helsinki have even managed to celebrate years without a traffic fatality thanks to a strong Vision Zero policy. Wouldn’t it be nice if this became a worldwide trend?
Heavy Toll: America’s Huge, Heavy Cars Are Killing More People
As America’s vehicles get heavier, they’re killing more Americans, according to research by The Economist.
If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of their machines has a cost, because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. What can be done about this killer car problem? In theory, regulators could insist that vehicles were lighter. But there is little chance of that happening.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/09/05/what-to-do-about-americas-killer-cars
The number of pedestrian deaths in the United States is skyrocketing. In 2022 traffic crashes killed 7,805 people on foot—that’s an 83 percent rise from 2009, and a 40-year high. The vast majority of those deaths involved a car colliding into a human.
technologies don’t work consistently, and even in the future their benefits will be limited. The one reliable way to address the harms of gigantic SUVs and pickups is to stop building them.
- Car harm will continue unless policies change; example interventions are discussed.
- Crashes kill 1.3 million people per year including 700 children per day.
- Traffic crashes injure approximately 100 million people annually. Intentional violence includes, for example, vehicle ramming attacks and armed conflicts over access to resources such as mined materials.
„We have grouped car harm into four categories (Fig. 2): violence (crashes and intentional violence); ill health (pollution, sedentary travel, and dependence and isolation); social injustice (unequal distribution of harm, inaccessibility, and consumption of space, time, and resources); and environmental damage (carbon emissions, pollution and resource extraction, and land use).“
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267
Rapidly increasing the number of electric cars on the road in place of conventional cars is a key part of reaching net zero emissions by mid-century. At the same time, SUVs require larger batteries to power them, so a growing electric SUV market would impose additional pressure on battery supply chains and further increase demand for the critical minerals needed to make the batteries. Addressing those risks ahead of time is possible through a number of actions: downsizing of the average car size; increasing battery swapping; and investing in innovative battery technologies. Those strategies would keep in check the investment requirements for developing the cobalt, copper, lithium and nickel resources needed to satisfy the increasing uptake of EVs.
For the last named problems I got three episodes of my podcast >She Drives Mobility< for you. Two for german speakers:
Short summary: The relevance of responsible raw material sourcing by car companies has only recently received more attention in connection with the drive change. The massive increase in demand for metals such as lithium, cobalt, graphite and nickel that has come with the rise of electric vehicles has brought to the fore the human rights, social and ecological problems associated with the mining of these raw materials. The German government has now also designated the automotive industry as a ‘human rights-relevant risk sector’.
https://katja-diehl.de/der-klima-und-rohstoffkrise-wird-nicht-mit-dem-e-auto-davongefahren
In this podcast episode, I delve deep into the world of critical raw materials with Hannah Pilgrim, an expert from the Berlin NGO PowerShift. We shed light on Germany’s dependence on metallic raw materials and the challenges that come with it. Together we discuss why our modern life would be unthinkable without these materials – from cars to smartphones – and how dangerous our dependence on imports can become. The episode offers insights into current European laws, the lack of transparency that accompanies their implementation and raises awareness of the social and ecological consequences of our hunger for raw materials.
And I talked about the greenwashed lithium deal with Serbia.
In this episode of my podcast, we talk about the very specific effects that the planned mining deal, which in Germany is primarily based on the lithium requirements of car manufacturers, will have on people in Serbia, from environmental destruction to displacement. We talk about state violence, which hundreds of thousands of people in the country refuse to be intimidated by because they are afraid of a future in which their country can no longer be worth living in because it has been exploited in a neo-colonialist manner. In July of this year, Belgrade gave the green light for lithium extraction, having temporarily halted it two years previously following pressure from environmentalists.
Episode here:
Noise.
Studies show that chronic exposure to noise can affect your sleep and hearing and contribute to health problems like heart disease. 100 million people nationwide were exposed to traffic noise every year that was loud enough to be harmful to their health. At the time, this was about 50% of the U.S. population. At high speeds, there may not be much difference between gas-powered cars and EVs or hybrids. That’s because other factors like tire and wind noise become louder as cars move faster. https://www.fastcompany.com/90774779/heres-what-science-says-about-electric-cars-and-their-impact-on-noise-pollution
Noise pollution can cause:
cardiovascular disorders
coronary artery disease
hypertension
increased stress levels
tinnitus
sleep disturbance
faster cognitive decline
learning and behavior issues-particularly in children
Electric vehicle subsidies help the climate and automakers, but not those depending on others modes of transport – also it is questionable to let all taxpayers for those who drive.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/10/electric-vehicle-subsidies-help-the-climate-u-s-automakers
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