Electric car or shanks's pony?
I suffered an unprovoked and violent attack from some influenza viruses, they decided to target me on new years eve. This gave me some time to anger-scroll through posts on a social media platform called Fessebook, or something like that. Ok there was some funny stuff, but there were loads of posts celebrating electric cars.
The ‘flu had slowed my brain down a bit and it took me a while to figure out the an ICE car means an internal combustion engine one. I had been wondering why they were discussing the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's fleet of cars.
Global EV Sales Are Projected To Jump 30% In 2025!!
Electric vehicles (EVs) are expected to dominate the car market in 2025!!
UK reaches million EV milestone!!
The fully Electric G Wagon is here!!
Celebrate good times, come on!
So, OK, for all you electric car fans out there put the following in your vape pipe and smoke it.
The slaughter
The statistics reveal that around 20,400 people were killed in road accidents in the EU in 2023, representing a small 1% decrease compared to the 2022 figures. Yup, read it again if you want, 20,400 people KILLED, in 12 months. Then we’ve got the 1.13 million people injured in road accidents. The socio-economic cost of fatal, serious, minor injuries and taking into account intangible elements is estimated to be about 2% of EU countries' gross domestic product - around 180 billion euros, about the same as the EU parliament’s total annual budget.
Auto-obesity
Yes it’s actually called that. The average weight of an electric/plug-in hybrid car sold in Germany between January and September 2022 was 32 percent higher than that of a petrol-powered competitor. There was a 21 percent increase in the average weight of cars sold in Europe between 2001 and 2022. Of course heavier vehicles means more tyre wear, see below. It’s also why getting slapped by a car is increasingly fatal, that and the new trendy brick front SUV shape of course.
Back in the day getting hit front on by a car meant an adult would tend to roll over the bonnet, I’ve been there and, yes, it hurts. If I’d been run into by a modern car going at the same speed with it’s front end that looks like the backend of a cathedral I wouldn’t be around to write this article.
Tyre and road wear particles (TRWP)
Globally, around 2 billion tyres are made a year. 78 per cent of microplastics in the ocean come from tyres. Emissions Analytics estimate that a car’s four tyres emit 1 trillion ultrafine particles per kilometre driven. Yes, 1 trillion, that’s 1018 or 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 teeny weeny toxic particles that enter the food chain per kilometre, (if you insist then that’s 0.6213712 of a mile). Something to mention to that person insisting on using their biodegradable straw having just driven a mile (1.609344 kilometres) to the bar.
The tyres also contain a cocktail of toxic heavy metals like copper, lead and zinc. Then of course there are the other synthetic chemicals that get put in like 6PPD which is used to slow tyre cracking. One of the breakdown products of 6PPD is 6PPD-quinone the cause of acute mortality in more than a dozen species of fish. All told, tyre rubber contains more than 400 chemicals and compounds, many of them carcinogenic. This goes under the subtle, tell it as it is, name of urban runoff mortality syndrome, URMS.
Not good at all.
In 2021, transport by car accounted for 79.7% of passenger-kilometres across the EU, compared with 7.3% for planes, 7.1% for coaches, buses or trolley buses, 5.6% for trains, and 0.3% for sea boats.
Around 40% of car journeys just move the driver. The average weight of a car in 2024 was 1857 kilos, that means shifting almost 2 tonnes to move one person.
You may be wondering where I’m going with all this? Well … my question is “why do we need cars and how can we redesign stuff so we don’t need them?”
OK, transitioning to a soft landing, move from Step 1 to step 3
Step 1. Can you walk it? Can you get on Shanks’s pony which is free, doesn’t need either electricity nor petrol. Maybe swap your gym session and replace it with a stroll to work? You’ll end up as fit as a butcher’s dog without the financial cost of going to the fitness centre.
Step 2. No viable alternative? Then car share, it’s a big thing here in France, it should be the same everywhere.
Step 2c. Swap your SUV for a motorbike. Less than half as many tyre particles, better fuel efficiency, cheaper to buy, much much more stylish and cool. On top of that bikers tend to stop and help other bikers if they are in difficulties. Yeah, I know, but I am a biker at heart!
Step 3 . Look at public transport solutions, it’s not losers who take the bus/tram/train it’s actually pretty cool. A friendly, in general, person drives you to near where you want to go, for a modest fee, and drops you off. You get to look at those poor sods sitting in their expensive, even if they were cheap, cars and even better you get to gaze out the window and daydream. Thinking about it, maybe we should stop calling it road rage and call it car rage? Buses, trams and trains tend to be pretty calm.
I remember visiting London, England, years ago, with my kids. We walked out of Victoria station and I was shocked by the lack of traffic. I immediately thought that there must have been a bomb threat or something. A friendly passer-by explained that the council had introduced a payment scheme for car drivers. Anyway, the buses rolled along free and easy. The bus driver told me that they had had to redo all the bus schedules because, without the car jams, buses were arriving at their destinations before they left their starting point. This struck me as being good old Cockney hyperbole designed to make a point in a humorous manner. The point being that public transport works loads better when there are no cars.
Step 4. Knock your job on the head and get creative. Start a local business and walk to work, or work from home. As a designer, I would insist that you create a dedicated work space at home, one on which you can shut the door and leave it behind.
This is all getting better and better, I got ‘flu and my vardo’s roof has sprung a leak, so far 2025 (Gregorian calendar) isn’t working out for me. Early days.