I wish we could have a conversation about smaller electric vehicles for the urban landscape rather than it be about bike vs large car, and bus vs large car, etc.
There is a middle ground for personal transportation that is hardly discussed. It's a chicken and egg issue. We need dedicated lanes for smaller, slower personal electronic vehicles.
Or in general with smaller cheaper, lighter vehicles. We should aim to build society where we don't need private vehicles for intercity transport. And then intracity we have electric bicycles or very small vehicles outside specific use cases.
Honestly if we were smart we'd stop this insanity and merge most car companies by countries/continents, make them produce a few models and call it a day.
A small 2 seats for cities, a comfy sedan for people who are on the road X hours per day, some kind of van for large families, trucks/buses
In big cities you could even ban personal cars and have a giant fleet of public cars to rent for X km or X days at an attractive price (not hard given the current prices of cars), this would be nationalised of course, maybe included in some kind of global public transport membership.
I bike daily and see what kind of people are on the road, you could replaced 90% of cars with a one seater and 30km of electric range and the vast majority of people wouldn't see a single difference in their daily commute.
This is trying to solve the wrong problem. We should be using smaller vehicles, such as electric scooters or automated microbuses in dedicated lanes, etc.
We should rethink why people need to travel great distances on a daily basis. Work-from-home was a major one that got the shake-up and now it's not a given that we must commute up to an hour or more each way each day.
I've always owned/driven a car since graduation, up until a few years ago. Then I decided to park the vehicle and walk/transit/uber for the incidental health benefits. I'm surprised I've not had much issue with this, though if I were to add it up it's probably costing me more time and money than driving myself. I could get a small e-vehicle or live somewhere more livable to improve that if it mattered more.
I doubt we'll be seeing them behind every bike. And if by any chance we will, most of them will be a lot smaller.
I'm big on having this kind of small e-vehicles on the roads, because I think they're the best chance we have on having truly nice, open, clean cities. Using a half-ton monstrosity to go buy a loaf of bread is a horrible waste of, not just resources, but commons. As you said, the worst thing is their size, and that is by necessity limited in urban areas.
So if we're going to have this kind of things replace cars, we'll have to be open to a larger ecology of e-vehicles, for various use cases. Including larger ones for cargo, and also the sick grandma that can't ride a bike.
Probably the biggest difference of opinion between us is that I see them as replacement for traffic, and so I want them scaled up and separate them from pedestrians as much as practically possible.
It’d be great if modern society could make smaller vehicles for personal use. Average number of occupants on the road has to below 2.0, seems terribly inefficient. The industries and costs associated w car ownership would have to adjust too for this too happen. Legislation is also necessary to deal with mutually destructive nature of not wanting to be on the same roads as larger fortified vehicles; i.e. lanes/roads dedicated to smaller personal vehicles.
Above all, as a society, we have to start giving a damn about environmental destruction. Rethink the status quo, rethink urban planning, rethink overuse of plastics, rethink leaf blowing...
It is a problem insofar as you trade more emissions for the next ten years at least for fewer emissions later and you cement in infrastructure for vehicles that are larger than needed. It seems better to me to encourage the use of smaller vehicles, public transport, and (electric-)cycling. For example I once owned a 1992 Renault Twingo. It needed about 5.5l/100km in the city. Why don't we slap a modern engine in a car of that weight class or build even smaller cars? It would be pretty hard to beat their lifetime emissions with an electric 3 ton SUV and they'd use less space in cities, allowing for denser neighborhoods where you need the car less.
I don't see why any electric vehicle can't be part of the sustainable urban transportation future.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Would it be better if we built cities around public transport? Generally yes. Does that mean there isn't a place for electric aircraft, electric cars, and smaller personal electric vehicles (bicycles, scooters, segways, hoverboards, skateboards)? Nope. I don't think anyone in this thread thinks that all of our future transportation needs will be satisfied by flight.
And given our current state of global pandemic, I think we can probably agree that even without the pros of other forms of transport, public transit has its own unique downsides.
Parking is still a huge issue, even for small EV cars. Micromobility modes like bikes (EV / non-EV), scooters, EUCs, etc. are more space efficient. Also charging these vehicles is easier than a micro car.
However, I could definitely see a city core where all personal car traffic is banned and commercial truck traffic is only allowed if it's EV and under a certain tonnage.
I live in Europe. I spend most of my driving time in and close to the city. The sole reason I need a car is that I often need to get from one side of the city to the other. That usually means ring roads and similar, which have higher speed limits and even higher actual speeds driven. Which means I need both something that won't cause a traffic jam there, AND something that is small enough to navigate and park in the city.
A lot of people also live just outside the city core and commute by car into the city. This too means roads with higher speed limits than the actual top speed of this car. Which means, it becomes a problem.
I live in a country where 5.6% of cars are electric. (By comparison, California has 1.3% electric cars). In part because of exactly this need to combine inner city and the periphery around the city. Authorities try to get cars out of the city, which is why they provide tax incentives to at least switch to electric for those who can't switch to public transport.
If we talk about people who only navigate inner cities, electric bicycles, scooters and small motorcycles are preferable from a traffic point if view since they are much more effective. They take up much less space on the road, require less parking space and can navigate the city much faster. (In the summer it is faster to navigate across the city on an electrical bicycle than it is to drive any car regardless of size)
From a government perspective, this car doesn't solve a problem. It creates new problems by increasing the space requirements and by putting new demographics into new settings. Dramatically so if the car were to be successful. From a consumer perspective it does offer more comfort for a narrow sliver of affluent teenagers, and a possible service vehicle for companies, municipalities etc.
For someone who needs a car anyway this is a typical second or third car - which means we fail to shrink down the fleet; it just grows larger.
Its _only_ qualities are size and aesthetics. It falls short in every other respect.
Another reason why we should not be making this big push for EVs but instead try to shift our infrastructure away from personal vehicles and towards mass transit and micromobility.
EVs will still make this picture look the same and are thus inherently an inefficient form of transport:
Other forms of electric transport, like scooters and electric bikes should be pushed more. Together with decent mass transit they solve the last mile problem quite nicely imho. But unfortunately the car lobby is extremely strong and doesn't want to lose its market.
The public needs to decide how to allocate public space: for roads, bus lanes, bike paths, or sidewalks. Even if everyone was magically given EVs tomorrow, cities would still be choked with traffic, fights for parking, and dead pedestrians run over by distracted drivers.
Since the 1950's, car centric thinking has dominated US transportation planning. Go to a US city meeting and experience the struggle to simply install a 3ft bike lane on a 4 lane road. You may recoil at restrictions being placed on cars but it's well past time for it to happen.
The beauty is that there are so many different ways to transport things now than the form factor of car. There are electric utility vehicles the size of golf carts with heat and cooling and a bed for transporting things. There are miniature vans similar to this. They all are quieter, safer, and take up less space than cars. I agree that cars have a place, but by and large their use should not be as catered to as it is now and life should not be centered around them.
I agree that we need electric cars but I think it’s a mistake to think of urban planning as needing to have such long gone scale. Some things are slow like planning rail lines but other things can be quick if you have the courage to do things like what Paris or London have done. An express bus lane is paint and cameras on the buses to punish scofflaws. A good bike lane needs physical barriers but a quick build design converting a parking or traffic lane is very fast - what makes it slow is the insistence that not a single parking spot be lost or driver forced to go only the speed limit.
Make it easy to build ADUs or upsize detached single family houses and you can double the number of people living in many neighborhoods in a decade or less simply by not preventing existing demands.
This is a good point and does not get that much attention. Electric cars are still large machines with a large environmental input. It is more environmentally friendly to just build out transit and encourage density. The vast majority of people would not need personal cars were they to live in a walkable area with good transit. Not only that, road building and maintenance is a far greater money sink than transit. People are just used to it and don't think about it.
There will always be a need for some people to have personal cars. There's no silver bullet to climate change, and moving to electric is a good thing. However, we realistically need to reduce total consumption (in terms of environmental resource input) massively. Making it easier for people to live without cars is relatively low-hanging fruit, and increases quality of life, to boot.
Right now our infrastructure and zoning in the US is all optimized for upper-middle-class 25–60 year-old able-bodied adults, and really sucks for children, the elderly, sick or disabled people, the mentally ill, the poor, foreign tourists, etc.
Even among healthy young professionals, we optimize for everyone having a long commute, living spread apart, strictly separating shops from housing, etc., such that basic living pretty much requires hours of driving time every day. In better designed cities which are a bit more compact and have arranged the most common destinations more centrally, car trips are less necessary, on average are shorter, and smaller slower cars would be more practical.
I’d love it if I could drive around town in a electric golf cart type vehicle that only cost a few thousand dollars new and topped at 15 mph (perhaps slightly larger and safer than a golf cart, but that general idea), without getting honked at and run over by angry dudes in SUVs. That would be better than a bike for carrying my groceries or driving a few miles in the rain, but much cheaper and more convenient for most purposes than a full-sized car.
So much of what is toxic about cars and car culture could be fixed by downsizing and slowing them. Primarily, less injuries and deaths - but also lower overall energy consumption and less pedestrian and cyclist hostility. I wish north america would fully get on board with these small EVs
Half of the problem with cars is a geometric one, they take up too much space. They give rise to sprawl and thus increase the demand for cars in a vicious cycle. Them being electric or self driving will not solve that.
There is a middle ground for personal transportation that is hardly discussed. It's a chicken and egg issue. We need dedicated lanes for smaller, slower personal electronic vehicles.
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