I swear, every time I hear this “cars are killing the economy” shit, it’s from some no-car-having-ass twat that’s going to ask me for a ride later that afternoon
Not only does pink girl have 5 knuckles where one would expect to find only 4, but she’s also somehow in the drivers seat at the same time as Glasses. And she’s wearing her backpack while also seated.
I got AI to generate an image very similar to a piece of digital artwork I did, based on a description. In the space of 10 or so seconds, it created something that looks much better than the piece that took me like 4 hours to do. And I think it really captured the mood and spirit of what I originally made.
I think AI can generate some really excellent pieces, sometimes it just takes a few regenerations and changes to your description prompt. Although it’s not perfect, it’s become pretty amazing IMO.
I don’t drive a car, so where’s my money for saving the planet? Where are my rebates for shoes and bikes?
Subsidizing the car industry is indeed dumb. I don’t think it’s hurting the economy though, as the goal is to continue to sell and replace millions of cars. Still, the infrastructure for cars is probably costing us much more on the long term though. Maintenance of expressways, space for parkings, and other infra for cars costs billions.
Just replacing a single expressway interchange in my city cost 4.3 billion! For ONE interchange.
So again, where are the rebates for people taking public transit? Where are the investments in public transit? Why is it only on the condition of BUYING A CAR?
Worth noting that the recent Infrastructure bill passed under Biden includes $108 billion for public transportation (Link). This is much larger than the $7.5B set aside for electric vehicles.
As much as I despise our car-centric infrastructure, climate change is a large enough threat that we should seriously consider and pursue multiple avenues of decreasing our emissions as fast as possible. Fully transitioning away from auto-dominant transportation in the US is, frankly, not realistic in a timely manner with the public support and resources available. Not only will transportation infrastructure need changing, but even the design of our cities. So while we should pursue broader public transportation, we should also pursue other initiatives with high likelihood of broad acceptance and rapid implementation. Electric vehicles seems to be one such initiative.
There are absolutely incentives - tax credits and rebates - for buying electric bikes in some areas. My state is offering $500 off any ebike purchase.
The auto industry is not being subsidized by consumer incentives. The auto industry is being subsidized by tax credits whenever they build a new facility, which is still arguably dumb. Consumer incentives are designed to get the average citizen to buy an EV over an ICE vehicle. The consumer is gonna buy a car anyway - someone in the market for a car isn’t going to buy a bike, even an ebike, based off of price. They’re buying a mode of transportation based off of lifestyle. Many simply can’t commute to work via bike or public transportation, and if a credit gets them to buy an EV over an ICE vehicle, this is a net benefit.
The solution to public transportation is not to attempt to disincentivize or punish car drivers, then build mass transit. Gotta build the mass transit first. The financial incentives for people taking mass transit are the fact that the most expensive mass transit in the US costs ~$1,500/year. The cost of owning an operating the average car in the US is ~$10,700/year. Yes, build more mass transit to free us from being slaved to expensive automobiles! But until then, preventing incentives for greener vehicles that would be purchased by those who have no choice is just shooting yourself in the foot.
I bought a 2002 Honda insight. One of the first hybrids, except the electric motor went out, so it’s all gas now. Still got slapped with an extra $150 so called “hybrid tax” so the state can subsidize a lower usage of gas that they would have received tax on. Literally incentivizes gasoline vehicles. What the fuck?
Electric cars are actually bad for the American economy though…
Each one takes less labor to build and the overwhelming majority of factories capable of producing ev batteries are overseas.
So while we can make evs domestically with less labor we now have fewer jobs and one of the most expensive parts of the car is being imported anyway, exerting downward pressure on the domestic workers in assembly.
So every electric car that replaces an internal combustion car is reducing the gdp in measurable terms.
Not that gdp is a good measure, but there’s a hard undeniable kernel of truth to the statement that electric cars are bad for the economy and specifically in a way that hurts working class Americans most.
You sound like an economist. They cost less to build and maintain. Which means the money is freed up to do other things. Only an economist would want to bailout inefficiency.
how are the ostensible productivity gains from evs going to be used to help american workers?
it’s hard to believe that the reduced demand for skilled tooling, die and machining labor will translate into some kind of gain for the communities and people that rely on that work to survive.
and we’ve seen how anemic reskilling efforts are and how the usual boilerplate response, “learn to code”, is completely defunct with the combination of LLMs and the cheap overseas junior dev labor pool.
american conservatives are trotting out these arguments to appeal to people who feel like they’re being forced to give up their lifestyle (driving cars with cheap gas), and materially are actually being heavily pressured to get evs without fully understanding the economics of this new class of Second Most Expensive Thing Most Americans Will Ever Buy, but that doesn’t mean that the realities that appeal is built on aren’t there.
Yeah an economist. Backwards ass logic of having more money in your pocket means you are poorer. A car factory is not a work program, it is a factory to make cars. Technological progress shouldn’t be crippled because some special interest group paid you to convince every single person to spend more money for an inferior good.
Goose chasing meme: more money in whose pocket, motherfucker?
Seriously. We’re talking about shitcanning a third of the us auto jobs. Who’s gonna get the money from that nightmare?
How can we expect those communities to take it lying down when they saw what happened and continues to happen to coal country?
This isn’t fake made up handwavey bullshit. These are the real effects of domestic ev production and we can’t just say “anyone who opposed evs is a conservative piece of garbage or a head-in-ass neoliberal economist.”
No really, the parts/labor breakdown of an ev skews farther to parts than an ice car. Who gets that money in their pocket in exchange for all the jobs?
What happens to the families and communities that depend on the jobs that are going away?
Have we learned anything from the failed reskilling of Appalachian coal country?
Come on, is the best insult you got that I sound like it’s my job to defend workers?
Really and truly, where will the labor cost savings go? There’s going to be one, so who gets it? How will that be enforced?
What’s gonna be done for the people whose labor isn’t needed anymore? Bear in mind we’re not just talking about the protagonists of the now forty year old song “Allentown”, but entire industries that support ice car production like die making and machining. Surely we have some idea of what happens here aside from “theyre fucked, some people’s blood and bonemeal grease the rails of progress”.
You can’t just handwave away the real effects of changes in productivity in the name of abstractly defined technological progress.
If you can’t seriously engage with the effects of a transition to producing electric cars then it’s no wonder American conservatives are making so much hay over it.
Because if it were, the big car makers would be rushing the hell out of pushing for killing off ICE cars and switching to 100% EVs like yesterday.
But yet most of them have put out a mediocre effort at best, offering maybe 2 models to attract the younger market. And even then, good luck actually getting one. You are on a wait list for at least a year, have to deal with dealerships that haven’t bothered to learn anything about them, and if they do miraculously have one on the lot, they’ve been using it as a loaner car, so it’s not even brand new. And while I was shopping around, I ran into multiple instances of the dealership taking the $7500 tax credit for themselves(because the tax credit is tied to the car, not to you buying it) and then having the gall to also mark up the sticker price, “due to high demand”.
Then other brands have basically outright resisted making them, or will make them, but it seems like they are only doing it to say they are going green. They’ll make like 2000 of the the dopeyiest looking car they can and trickle them out, make no effort to advertise them or mass produce them in any meaningful way. Then claim, “the demand just isn’t there”.
Like if what you said was true, we would be seeing things like dodge challengers, Ford mustangs(ones that actually look like a mustang, not just a crossover with a horse logo), dodge rams, Ford f150s(yes these exist, but they are trickleing them out, so good luck getting one), jeep Wranglers. Nobody is taking their tried and true cars and making them electric. Well VW is, but not in America with things like the golf and GTI lines.
We don’t see lots of high drag coefficient evs that look like mustangs because all the features of the mustang that make it look boxy and aggressive are there to accommodate the reality of making air go places it’s needed, across the radiator and into the engine.
We don’t see ev jeeps because jeeps are (or used to be) relatively lightweight, high torque vehicles whose design choices favor ground clearance over aerodynamics. Evs are relatively heavyweight and benefit most from low ground clearance and good aerodynamics.
When automakers try to put those designs in an ev buyers react negatively to them, to the point that they have to have ersatz engine noise to be accepted.
Indeed the wrangler and mustang are so disconnected from normal buying trends that they kept stick shift long after the industry wide move to automatics!
Those are popular models, but they’re extreme outliers in terms of design.
Let me address the top part of your reply with a question: if evs are so great and such a slam dunk why has Toyota, famous for not making the wrong choices, stuck with hybrids up until very recently?
Ford has plans to build a battery plant in the US which will bring about 2,500 jobs with it. Not doing anything and letting the rest of the world make and deliver the cars to the US would be much worse for the economy than doing nothing at all.
They’re planning on building four, and they paused construction recently as a power play in negotiations when the uaw said battery workers should get the same pay as the machinists.
I saw that those plants will be making batteries for the new f150, not the much smaller evs that everyone else drives.
Battery manufacture is part of its own can of worms though, and one that doesn’t make evs look great either.
I wanna also say that I’m not against spinning down the ice auto industry, but no one who’s suggesting doing that or making fun of people who recognize that it’s the consequence of things that are already happening has a real plan for it.
To be fair, the F150 has been the best selling vehicle in America for something like 40 years. If the Lightning can hold on to that market, that will be a lot of vehicles, even if all it does is that one.
That being said, I’d rather we invest in better infrastructure and transit that reduces the dependance on cars. I don’t know exactly how many jobs that would create vs the auto industry. But across infrastructure, bikes, trains, potentially getting people back into retail shops and out of online everything… It’d image it would be a lot of jobs.
they’re gonna be a hit with the people who’ve been buying them instead of sedans lately, but the fleet and rural markets are gonna be less inclined to use em and needing a big battery service periodically is gonna change the long term value proposition of a full size truck for a lot of people.
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. They do have some interesting utility. They can be used of power tools directly off the battery. The front trunk can allow for tool storage when the bed is full of whatever. They can be hooked up to your home to provide power during a grid outage. These are all pretty cool, but there will still be a lot of anxiety around running out of power, and the things you mention.
My first one was $400, and still works just fine, I just left it in another state. The one I have now was $1200. Admittedly I got the first one for a steal in 2018, and prices have more than doubled since then.
$2500 gets you the top of the line, not just a good E-bike.
Is this ai generated ? or is it just poorly photoshoped because there’s a lot of texture detail missing from the image
Edit: it also looks like someone told it to make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and it created a Asian-European version of her because the face seems to similar
Yeah, I thought it was just over smooth, but fuuuck.
Look at 1st girls teeth in 1st pic. They get bigger from left to right, despite the camera angle. 3rd pic, normal size. Also. See the glasses bridge between 1&3, changes shape, weorrd spot in eye on 3
Mine weighs 1.5 tons and is going strongly into it’s sixth year of existence at about 95% capacity left. 3/4 of the year I’m driving it exclusively using power from my own roof. It uses about 14kWh/100km which is the equivalent of about 1.3 Liters of Gasoline. I fail to see how all of this is not an advantage.
You fail to see how basing an economy on the premise of (almost) everyone relying on 1.5ton machine to get around? I fail to see what’s so difficult to see
While relatively better, it’s still incredibly wasteful
I have an electric bike for those instances where I only need to transport myself and a backpack. But then again, I’ve got a few hectars of forest to take care of, family within a 100km radius and a girlfriend and a dog, so riding my bike is not always an option.
Yeah I am not doing that again. It was fun when I was single but not so much when you have kids. Yes I have done the sidecar thing and yes I have been to regions of the world where this is the norm. Not doing it again, all it takes is one accident and my family will be dead.
Yes, a noble idea, sure, but what do I do now with the ressources available to me? I am not a politician, people here laugh about the green party because most of them are farmers, land owners and factory workers, so voting green has some sort of meaning for the stats but doesn’t impact anything in local politics. I don’t own a company, I’m not responsible for public transport or any decisions related to it and I’m not rich enough for outright bribery lobbyism, so what I can do is:
turn most of my appliances to running on electricity
make as much electricity as possible locally from renewables
Hence, electric cars. Oh yeah, and taking the bike when possible, I do that.
Home batteries, wallbox for the cars (honestly, those are just fancy plugs with some switching logic) and panels was about 30k€, heatpump and floor heating was about 60k€. The heatpump helps with using even more of my own energy. Currently I’m almost 100% self sufficient (including mobility, except for lonmg range drives) between the middle of march and the middle of october, which is okay. At current inflation rates all this will have paid for itself in about 18 years in comparison to more traditional versions of all of it.
Anti-car folks are the same as anti-meat folks. Too busy being right to notice that even if they’re right, the rest of the world isn’t going to agree with them. So they shit on any idea for improvement that isn’t complete abstinence.
People in general aren’t going to give up cars anytime soon, just like people aren’t going to give up meat. It’d be great if everyone did, but that’s a pipedream if you think that could happen in at least the next decade or two. So maybe efforts to reduce the impact of those kinds of things aren’t necessarily wasted.
Coming straight from “unless 100% of people abstain 100% I’m not calling it change”-folks. There’s significant shifts in both of these issues. Meat more so, or leading ahead compared to cars, but the fact that some people aren’t going to drop one or either doesn’t change anything about that.
So maybe efforts to reduce the impact of those kinds of things aren’t necessarily wasted.
Not only are they not wasted, they are absolutely necessary. What’s important to understand is, however, that large parts of the negative impact of cars aren’t affected by EVs at all. It’s not just internal combustion engine exhaust pollution, it’s the waste of space, gigatons of asphalt for roads and parking, microplastics from rubber tires driven endless miles by a billion people, traffic congestions and the never-ending demand for another lane to fix them, ““cities”” sprawling out so far that everything is too far to get to by any means other than driving, pedestrian (if such a thing even still exists in your neck of the woods) safety, noise, socioeconomic factors such as the high upkeep costs vs low-income population who are reliant on a car in a car dependant world, …
We have to transition to EVs either way, but it’s not going to fix anything meaningful. And that’s just the neutral outlook, a real danger we’re facing is that through car manufacturers’ greenwashing that is already in full swing, we coax ourselves to a good eco conscience over our no-emissions cars and continue growing the dependency, which would eventually increase the impact. The only real way of reducing the impact is by reducing cars and car dependency where it’s possible. And people are, very slowly, waking up to the fact that this is more often the case than they were led to believe by lobby driven media and politics of the last 60 years.
It’s actually spewing tire and brake particles everywhere. It’s responsible for 30% of microplastics in our environment. It should not be anywhere near our main mode of transportation in the future.
Why? So they can oppress people who have mobility issues? Why is it that every single time some small brained Fuck Cars person posts, it’s horribly and insultingly ableist?
Biking in the Netherlands, you regularly see people with different mobility devices riding in the bike lanes. That’s because bike lanes are also for people with mobility issues. The “anti-car is ableist” argument is actually itself ableist because a lot of people with mobility issues actually can’t drive either. Continued investment in car infrastructure vs bike infrastructure traps these people at home.
First of all, nothing I wrote was ableist and you fucking know it.
Second, you say that as if subsidizing cars isn’t itself ableist, since there are plenty of disabled folks who can’t drive and therefore rely on infrastructure that accommodates alternatives like transit and walking.
In reality, subsidizing biking doesn’t affect the disabled in any way (except possibly to help them by encouraging better lanes and ramps that can be used by both bicycles and wheelchairs). In contrast, further subsidizing car-centrism very much hurts them and you damn well know it.
Last year, my sister had her driver’s license suspended because of a medical condition, but she’s still perfectly capable of riding a bike. But the problem is our societal assumption of cars-for-all-whether-you-like-it-or-not means her neighborhood street design is extremely hostile to her getting around by bike safely, and it’s way too sprawling and car-dependent to walk anywhere. There’s also no public transit within a reasonable walking distance.
So I might ask you: Do you believe people like my sister deserve the same right to mobility as the rest of us? If so, why support a system that make life actively hostile to her and people like her? You act as if disabilities are a monolith, and that cars are only ever their saviors, as if cars are never the thing making life actively more difficult for many people.
You do realize that cars and car centric infrastructure make it harder for disabled people to get places right? You do realize that public transport is infinitly more beneficial to the disabled than cars are right?
Car infra is the most ableist thing in transportation you idiot.
Try being vision impaired and driving. Try being in a wheelchair and getting down the average American street. Try having a limp and crossing a large intersection in 20 seconds. Try being an entirely able bodied person and getting to the other side of a highway that cuts through your city.
Right? I wish more people would consider the product life cycle analysis of what they want to purchase. Virtue signaling doesn’t help, and nor does more scrap ending up in a landfill at the end of the cradle to grave trip.
I’d love an E bike! It would be great to take the train into the city for me and use it to get around. I haven’t been able to afford insurance and still don’t have a driver’s license. It’d save me a killing and allow me to actually save my money than have it guzzled up by gas, car maintenance, and overall way less hassle for me. I’d rather not have to worry about features eventually getting pay walled by the shitfotainment system…
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