EVs emit about half of the co2 per mile (including manufacturing emissions) as ICE cars today, and that figure is falling rapidly as we decarbonize electricity production. In what world is a 50% reduction in emissions "stagnation"?
If it perpetuates an inefficient form of urban settlement, then it is at best a local optimization. Look at all the people in this subthread who are demanding a cradle-to-grave lifecycle analysis but are for some reason unwilling to expand the scope of that analysis to ponder the question of why the car should exist at all.
In a world with more than one single dimension. Have you considered there are other factors in addition to CO2 per mile?
A trivial example is total number of miles driven. If we end up driving twice as much then that's your CO2 gains gone right there. Considering that's exactly what's happened since 1983 does that seem unlikely?
Do EVs do anything to reverse this trend? Do they do anything for pedestrian safety? Do they do anything about the need for parking and huge roads? Do they do anything about noise and particulate pollution of tyres? Do they do anything about road rage? I could go on and on.
Focussing solely on one single metric is extremely foolish, but of course it's exactly what the car manufacturers want because they've found a solution for that one metric.
> A trivial example is total number of miles driven. If we end up driving twice as much then that's your CO2 gains gone right there. Considering that's exactly what's happened since 1983 does that seem unlikely?
Yes, it seems unlikely that we would double our number of miles driven because this is a factor of time spent driving, population, and speed. There's no indication that speed limits will increase or that people are interested in longer commutes, and population growth is stagnating.
> Do EVs do anything to reverse this trend? Do they do anything for pedestrian safety? Do they do anything about the need for parking and huge roads? Do they do anything about noise and particulate pollution of tyres? Do they do anything about road rage? I could go on and on.
Climate change is a much more significant problem than these. I can live with wide roads and parking lots; it's much harder to live with our global breadbaskets succumbing to increasingly severe droughts and the geopolitical destabilization that entails.
And there's no way we're going to pivot away from ICE cars to public transit quickly enough to meet climate goals even if there was the political will to do so (and there isn't, because lots of people get a lot of value out of cars, and even places with lots of public transit options are seeing a rise in car ownership and usage). There's just no way it's going to happen over the next century.
Moreover, there's tons we could do about pedestrian safety, tire pollution, road noise, etc without eliminating cars, but we lack the political will even to do these things so there's certainly no way we're going to abolish cars and transition to public transit / cycling lifestyles.
> Focussing solely on one single metric is extremely foolish
It's foolish to treat all metrics as equally important. You can't live without food; you can live with car noise.
> of course it's exactly what the car manufacturers want because they've found a solution for that one metric
Yeah, car manufacturers love paying Tesla so they can keep making ICE cars /s. Cars are wildly popular in the west (car adoption is increasing across the board, even among the Dutch); the auto industry doesn't need to do a psyop to convince people to drive--it's just much more convenient than the alternatives even where the alternatives are very well developed/supported.
