Alright guys, a little while ago I had an epiphany. I do not like cars… like at all. Here’s how I came to this conclusion. Climate change is a problem - a big one. For the record, I don’t believe in climate science; in my opinion, that’s just a liberal arts pseudo science invented by New Yorkers. No rather, just look at physics. I am a huge physics nerd, btw, as I’ve been fascinated by astronomy and astrophysics since the age of like 4 or 5. And cars create a lot of greenhouse gasses - mostly in the form of highly toxic carbon monoxide. When I look at the amount of gas guzzlers around me, I loose hope for humanity. How can we ever replace them all by 2050? And mainstream car manufacturers still produce tons of new gas guzzlers every year! Speaking of guzzling gas, I also hate paying for it - that shit’s expensive - especially for a broke college student like me. So I’ve pointed out that I hate paying for gas. I also hate spending money on vehicle maintenance. I spent about $1000 on repairing my car last year - and that’s not including labor because I repaired it myself. Now let’s look at the alternative: Electric vehicles. Those all suck. All the regular car manufacturers copy the worst of Tesla, if they even make a fully electric car, while still completely missing the mark on what Tesla gets right. Take for example, Ford’s Electric mustang. Who da fuq are they targeting this car to? Anyway, with Tesla, this video sums up pretty much all my problems: https://youtu.be/vcu2YUCa0lA.
Plus, like Ryan points out, having a glorified iPad instead of a real dashboard is stupidly asinine. Teslas are becoming nothing more than a IoT smart car at this point. They lack freedom, ownership, privacy, and user control on so many levels. Heck, currently I drive a 2007 jeep Compass. I am fairly sure it ain’t phoning home to Daimler Chrysler and telling them everywhere I drive so that they can send it to my insurance company. Speaking of which, car insurance companies are evil; they’re not as evil as “broadband” companies mind you, but they are evil nevertheless. They know that many Americans need a car. And because all humans suck at driving - including myself - states need to mandate that drivers obtain a minimal insurance. When I got my first car at 17 years old, I looked at owning a car as the necessary and “responsible” thing to do. Now I just see cars for what they actually are. I’ve never had to use my insurance, and yet because of state laws, I still have to pay Allstate about $800/year - and Allstate has a bad reputation for illegally using extraneous data about you to hike prices: Why You May Be Paying Too Much for Car Insurance - Consumer Reports. This is the same shit that Hotels do to charge as much as possible for a room. Some people will inherently have a higher rate because of their shopping habits and/or credit score. Shopping habits have nothing to do with how safe of a driver you are. (Oh and also Allstate’s drive safe and save is a scam just so they can collect more data on you).
And Insurance isn’t something that you can ditch just by buying an EV. Plus even EVs are still pretty bad for the environment. They’re better than internal combustion engine vehicles by a long shot. But manufacturing them is still highly polluting. There’s a lot of material - especially metals and rare earth metals - that have to be refined by often energy intensive processes… then it has to be assembled. Plus at EOL, EVs don’t fair well there either. Granted they fair a little better than ICE vehicles still.
So in conclusion (TL;DR), I hate cars because they are expensive to own and wholly very detrimental to the environment. Plus new cars that are less detrimental to the environment still have a fairly expensive cost of ownership, very privacy invasive, and abusive to their customers - using mostly software to facilitate this abuse. Also, it’s rather inefficient to use a 2 ton hunk of metal and plastic to carry one 200-lb sack of meat. Plus being in a car is scary because at any given moment you could slam into another 2 ton hunk of metal at a very high velocity - or it could slam into you; and you have no control over that. Why did we humans do this to ourselves.