this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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I live in buttfuck nowhere - France.
We need cars because the railways were deemed not profitable. We need cars because investment in busses is often very limited (depending on where you live). We need cars because village markets are dying and we then have to go to the supermarket the town over.
We need cars because of the capitalist atomisation of society.
And even then, the vast majority of our trips are very short (< 40' round trip'). The car we need the most is a very small, kinda lowtech electric one. But those don't exist as much...
In our 750 people village, I think we'd need about 1 car for every 3 to 5 families and 3 trucks.
TL;DR: Rural people need cars. But we don't need big ones for most of our usage. We need better public transportation. Personal car ownership is dumb and wasteful.
I also live in rural France, and agree. People with giant SUVs are becoming a huge problem where I live. Every day I see countless older people whose kids no longer live with them driving these gas-guzzling monstrosities to the supermarket. Often they have the same amount of seats as a sedan, yet they take up waaay more space in the parking lot. Just why? I don't get it.
Because bigger car = bigger margins for the manufacturer. I guess it's a status symbol too?
Also some environmental legislations have amendments for bigger vehicles. It seems that it was easier to make bigger cars than to make explosion motors more efficient (which is technically true).
I find all of that pretty dumb.
A part of it was that to make ice engines more efficient, they got more complicated, which made them heavier. Weight and efficiency standards are looser on larger categories of vehicle, and consumers typically like more space and perceive them as safer.
So you sell more of them and it's easier to keep pace with the regulations.
My last vehicle switch was from a hatchback to a compact SUV. New car weighs twice as much as the old one, but also gets significantly higher fuel efficiency.
I took a trip through Europe in the early 00's. We rented a large sedan. 5 Americans and luggage. Our intent was to drive through as many open countries as we reasonably could. After about a hour on the road, we had to get a second car. We were simply too fat to have 5 people in what was locally considered a full-sized car.
In the US we would have got an SUV and been able to sit without touching each other.
But our situation was A. Not Normal and B. Brought on by our own live decisions. There is a bit of a Why there though.