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SUVs make up more than 40% of new cars sold in the UK – while fully electric vehicles account for less than 2%

editor said:
How many people have been killed by a Citroen Ami - sorry, metal box killer quadricycle, then?

PS You'll need a car licence to drive them in the UK, so you're both hysterical and wrong.
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You don't to drive light quadricycles, although it seems the Ami is too heavy to be classed as a such, so has managed to circumvent the safety regulations that apply to cars whilst being heavy enough to require a licence. I'm surprised you're in favour of such rule-bending nonsense when it comes to motors.

The Ami hasn't killed anyone in the UK yet because no one seems to want to drive one, despite them being touted as the answer to everyone's problems.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Their prices look decent. If you're driving once or twice a week, that's got to be much cheaper than running your own car. How many people could change their lifestyle so that they are only driving once or twice a week and can switch to something like zipcar? For some people, that's not going to be possible, but I don't believe it's impossible for a big number of people.

For example, for someone who drives to work and would otherwise need a rail season ticket that costs perhaps £1,000s, if you look at how much it would cost to switch to rail, cycling to the station and driving perhaps on the occasional weekend with a zipcar, is that really so much more than the cost of running your own car? It's not, is it? Even with today's fucked up rail system, it's not.
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My brother hasn't had a car since moving back to London 10 years ago. He's got the money but finds zipcar works fine for him. He only drives about once a fortnight anyway.
 
rubbershoes said:
My brother hasn't had a car since moving back to London 10 years ago. He's got the money but finds zipcar works fine for him. He only drives about once a fortnight anyway.
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I know a lot of this can sound London-centric, but 8 million people live here. It's 1 in 8 British people. Really, the majority of Londoners don't need a car of their own. And it can't be the only city in which this is true. How many Brummies really need their cars?

But I acknowledge that public transport in London is different from everywhere else. Even people who own cars often don't use them very often.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
I know a lot of this can sound London-centric, but 8 million people live here. It's 1 in 8 British people. Really, the majority of Londoners don't need a car of their own. And it can't be the only city in which this is true. How many Brummies really need their cars?

But I acknowledge that public transport in London is different from everywhere else. Even people who own cars often don't use them very often.
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British transport infrastructure is absolutely fucking dire and even the larger cities with good bus networks suffer from a lack of routes and out of hours provision- coupled with massive delays due to road traffic

The less said about the rail network the better


London is the exception
 
Which brings us back to the notion of carrot and stick. Improve the public transport networks, break the habit of driving. 83% of the population live in urban areas, most of that could be made efficient enough to bear most people using public transport, bicycles or their own feet to get around.
 
yes and that's also where ideas like the 15-minute neighbourhood come in. Another justification of the car people use is that they need it for their 'big shops'. But if they have shops within walking distance, most people can turn that big shop into two or three smaller shops easily enough. And they get some walking in.
 
In addition to the Ami is the ageing Renault Twizzy and the brand new Fiat Topolono amongst others. The legislation is slightly grey. A light electric Quadricycle can be driven on a motorbike licence.
en.m.wikipedia.org

Quadricycle (EU vehicle classification) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
As for deaths, many more people have been killed riding or being hit by electric scooters and electric bikes, where there is no legislation and can be ridden at high speeds by people with no road sense. I think you will find the quadracycles will mostly be driven by people who want to pootle around town.
 
Not only is London a wild outlier from the rest of the UK in terms of its public transport infrastructure, I'd wager that inner London is vastly better than outer London - that this 'people in London, 1 in 8 of the UK population, don't need cars because PT is great in London' looks very different in Hayes or Bexleyheath, or Enfield to how it looks in Brixton, or Camden.

Its also about what the individual feels is important in their life, not the metrics. Driving to work is the thing I do most regularly, but it isn't the thing that's most important about having a car - that's day trips, weekends away. I take a dump far more regularly than I spend time with my daughter at uni, but taking a dump is by no stretch the more important of the two.

If you live in London and you want to spend your leisure time in London then PT is probably great, but if your thing is taking your kids camping in the New Forest or whatever, it's crap.

As ever, people thinking that what they do is what everyone does...
 
littlebabyjesus said:
yes and that's also where ideas like the 15-minute neighbourhood come in. Another justification of the car people use is that they need it for their 'big shops'. But if they have shops within walking distance, most people can turn that big shop into two or three smaller shops easily enough. And they get some walking in.
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Are you a LibDem Guardian columnist by any chance?
 
tbh if you live anywhere in London, unless you're heading out of London, there's a decent public transport option there for you, whether it is a bus, tube, tram for the Croydon folk, or overground train. Yes, even in Enfield or Bexleyheath.

But yes, if you're heading out of London, that's possibly not so true. I've taken other people's kids camping in Sussex from London fwiw. No car involved. You tailor what you do to what you can do, so choose a campsite near a train station.
 
platinumsage said:
It was your patronising "And they get some walking in" which did it for me. Like you genuinely think those weekly shopping car fools don't know how to exercise.
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Ok cool. I'll make a note to include more tips in future. :cool:

I do like it when drivers make lists of all the things they couldn't do if they didn't have a car, though, when most of those things are things I have done without a car. ;) More of that please.
 
Rob Ray said:
Which brings us back to the notion of carrot and stick. Improve the public transport networks, break the habit of driving. 83% of the population live in urban areas, most of that could be made efficient enough to bear most people using public transport, bicycles or their own feet to get around.
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Yeh those 83% also represent presumably a higher amount of car usage per person. Because the public transport is shit and expensive. The hire ebikes round here cost more than the bus for the same distance. The park and ride for the only city is about to fall apart as it simply is not worth anyone running it. I would argue it should be a public service but that is not happening in a hurry with the public funding to local councils heading quickly towards 0.
kebabking said:
Not only is London a wild outlier from the rest of the UK in terms of its public transport infrastructure, I'd wager that inner London is vastly better than outer London - that this 'people in London, 1 in 8 of the UK population, don't need cars because PT is great in London' looks very different in Hayes or Bexleyheath, or Enfield to how it looks in Brixton, or Camden.

Its also about what the individual feels is important in their life, not the metrics. Driving to work is the thing I do most regularly, but it isn't the thing that's most important about having a car - that's day trips, weekends away. I take a dump far more regularly than I spend time with my daughter at uni, but taking a dump is by no stretch the more important of the two.
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Yeh whenever I was in London I used the tube, walked or used the bus. Cheap as anything and its all mostly close together for things to get to compared to rural areas. Commuting there is expensive but that just makes the point more relevant, further you are from London in England the worse it is mostly.

These ideas of renting for the rare occasion you don't need a pretend motorbike with 4 wheels and no crumple zones is daft unless you are bang in the centre of where this works best and have no dependents or stuff to move, which is not the vast majority of people. Wasn't that the idea of ULEZ etc, rich people can do whatever they want as usual and the rest can take public transport. Where this is unavailable it sounds stupid. My journey to work was 4.5 times longer by public transport and cost more one way than private plus involved 2 hours of walking a day for a standard gov job with a reasonably accessible location in the nearest city.

If we take the best possible area for something in the country and generalise it then we get nonsense. Our local park and rides are about to close if nothing happens cos the bus companies pulled out based on it not being economical. After they put up thousands of spaces in multiple car parks. Then ignored one direction so it was further and more expensive to wait for a bus then take one and do the same the way back then just park in town and save 30-60mins a day depending on the timetable
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Ok cool. I'll make a note to include more tips in future. :cool:

I do like it when drivers make lists of all the things they couldn't do if they didn't have a car, though, when most of those things are things I have done without a car. ;) More of that please.
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That's your problem, you think they are you but they're not.

"I sleep on the floor therefore people who say they need a bed to sleep in are pathetic"

Give yourself a round of applause and a pat on the back.
 
There isn't any public transport where I live, well there is it consists of one bus per hour in each direction during the week and Sat dropping to every couple of hours on Sunday. closest stop is about a mile from my house. If you want to get around you need a car (your own or someone else's via Uber) The school where Mrs Q works and our Youngest daughter was once a pupil is 6 miles away for which Mrs Q needs a car, Youngest (who is now at Uni) used to be quite happy taking the school bus but it was long gone by the time her mother needed to come home so car it is. She used to have a 1200cc Micra and now has a hybrid Yaris which minimises the environmental impact but quite happy to admit cutting fuel costs was the main driver not anything else.
As for me I have worked from home the past 3 years due to Covid (go into the office once in a while) but before that I meandered all over the North and the Midlands not to mention visiting Mrs Q family in Liverpool or mine in Crewe or a weekend away. I need a big car at that, I am a father of four indeed I have managed to acquire 2 son-in-laws (a third looking highly likely), a soon-to-be daughter-in-law and 2.6 grandchildren. Filling every seat in a big car is dead easy for me, when we go anywhere in force, fewer bigger cars work out better than more smaller ones.
As for shopping locally yes we have an Aldi, a Tesco Direct, a pharmacy and a number of takeways all within convenient walking distance and walk I indeed do when I shop there quite often.
However whilst it may be a possibility now there are (mostly) just the two of us, when we were a household of 6 the idea of doing our big shop on foot with multiple trips to the Aldi is just plain daft, it would take all day.
Perfectly happy to take steps to try and minimise my environmental costs where possible, the ULEZ expansion has caused me to start looking for a replacement for my diesel Audi (The Yaris has totally sold me on the idea of a bigger hybrid) since I reckon whilst London doesn't effect me there will be more ULEZ's elsewhere.
But ultimately at the end of the day I accept that there is an environmental cost of me running a car and I have decided that I consider it an acceptable one without the need to jump through mental gymnastics to justify it. Fully aware that other people out there might not consider it acceptable but when push comes to shove it's me that makes the decision not them.
And most other people feel the same way as I do even if I am probably a bit more honest than most of them.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
...when most of those things are things I have done without a car. ;)
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I'm on holiday in the south west. Everyday after walking the dog I drive past lines of families with young kids and about 50 bags trudge down the road to the train station in the pissing rain.

They will undoubtedly get home, but you'll forgive me for forgoing the experience of trying to entertain my piss wet kids on an overcrowded, wildly unreliable train for 5 hours next to a toilet that smells like it was leftover from Glastonbury in a Cholera epidemic.

And then they get on a bus.

Only a moron would choose to drive from Barnet into central London, but only another moron would pretend that it's more convenient, and simply more enjoyable, to get from Barnet to a campsite in the Forest of Dean by bus/train/bus/walk that it would be to drive.
 
I'm not making this as a case for or against (just a statement of what I think is a fact) but the idea that we can do away (even just quite significantly, rather than almost totally) with private car use as we have now without an almost total overhaul in how people live and work, which will also have to include a huge cultural shift in what people do and how they see themselves, the world, and others about them is deluded imo.
 
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platinumsage said:
You don't to drive light quadricycles, although it seems the Ami is too heavy to be classed as a such, so has managed to circumvent the safety regulations that apply to cars whilst being heavy enough to require a licence. I'm surprised you're in favour of such rule-bending nonsense when it comes to motors.

The Ami hasn't killed anyone in the UK yet because no one seems to want to drive one, despite them being touted as the answer to everyone's problems.
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Sorry, could you give an example where anyone has claimed that the car is "the answer to everyone's problems"?
 
Society is currently shaped around the Big Shop and the logistical logics of car ownership, but the fact is it can't be forever. At some point it will change no matter how much folks on here complain that they're quite attached to the status quo and simply can't/don't want to do anything else.

The question isn't whether we'll have to learn to live without big personal motors running on cheap fossil fuels, it's how that transition is going to happen. It's change or die, with change and die becoming more likely the more tightly people hold on to what they grew up with and the more they act as flak producers for the firms which profit from inertia.
 
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Rob Ray said:
Society is currently shaped around the Big Shop and the logistical logics of car ownership, but the fact is it can't be forever. At some point it will change no matter how much folks on here complain that they're quite attached to the status quo and simply can't/don't want to do anything else.

The question isn't whether we'll have to learn to live without big personal motors running on cheap fossil fuels, it's how that transition is going to happen. It's change or die, with change and die becoming more likely the more tightly people hold on to what they grew up with and the more they act as flak producers for the firms which profit from inertia.
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Your logic is fundamentally flawed, you're conflating the system of propulsion with the existence of the thing being propelled.

Renewable powered cars already exist - the infrastructure to support doesn't, but that simply about rolling out existing engineering: once cars are renewably powered there shouldn't be a problem.

Cities of course are a slightly different proposition, that's a question not just of pollution, but space, but I neither live not work in a city, so I don't give a fuck what those chair sniffing perverts do....
 
It's not simply a question of making the thing. Much as Capital would like to convince us it can fix this through selling us yet more shit, that's not real, it's PR. The batteries are unsustainable to produce, renewable energy requires huge amounts of steel and mined materials, the switchover in industrial production will itself be massively polluting , and electric simply isn't particularly functional in a wide range of circumstances from farming machinery to heavy haulage and cold weather so a huge amount of CO2 production will be baked in regardless. It's not some panacea for our ills especially given capitalism's need for continual growth.

The reality is that buying another couple of tons of mobile refined metal that needs to be renewed every few years, as Capital intended it, is in and of itself an unsustainable thing to do if:

 
platinumsage said:
Because they are roads not campsites. A couple hundred years ago you couldn't camp in the middle of them either, because they were full of horses and carts.
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Yes roads. Not free parking spaces. And your dumb comparison with a couple of hundred years ago has backfired catastrophically because most roads were pretty much empty apart from the odd cart.
And front gardens weren't paved over to make way for yet more parking space.
 
Rob Ray said:
Pretty sure horses and carts didn't line every street in town at all hours, there weren't as many of them for a start.
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You couldn't camp on roads though, or randomly use the road for your hipster market stall or whatever. The use of road space has been regulated for centuries in favour of transport, which is what they have always been for.
 
editor said:
Yes roads. Not free parking spaces. And your dumb comparison with a couple of hundred years ago has backfired catastrophically because most roads were pretty much empty apart from the odd cart.
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Yes empty, set apart by the government for the exclusive use of transport, not for some random hipster glamping schemes.
 
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