Society's got priorities wrong.
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most car travels are 1 person or sometimes 2 person
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the majority of car travels are quite short, less than 40km.
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many car travels are just to get some groceries or drop of a little package or just say "hi" to someone, carrying nothing but themselves.
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cars are fucking expensive, to buy and to maintain
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accidents become way worse with heavier vehicles
Microcar is a valid answer to all of these, while still being sheltered from weather.
How are urban places (i'm in Belgium) with almost permanent super heavy road traffic congestion, bad climate statistics, high polution values, very limited available space left, no self-sustaining energy production and high traffic accident statistics still pooring in billions and billions in subsidies year after year into "regular" big heavy SUV-like vehicles instead of these? It's beyond my comprehension. The only real valid reason i somewhat get is the collective scare of being in a crash and not wanting to be in the smaller vehicle. We could save the climate, we choose not to.
- MICROLINO: 17.990 €
- OPEL ROCKS: 8.699 €
- CITROEN AMI: 7.790 €
- RENAULT TWIZY: 13.000 €
- FIAT TOPOLINO: 9.890 €
A lot of people here casually spend more on a sunday racing bike every few years for fucks sake.
I personally saw almost all these models in Amsterdam and Belgium this year. They are pretty great addition to existing solutions like trams, metros, busses, and cycling.
No reason to need to have a 4 seat car when most of the time you may be the only person in the vehicle. Would be cool if we could find these in North America more easily. I do find our personal vehicles are becoming too large causing more sprawl and larger parking lots, which in turn nesesitates car dependency when everything is so far apart because of our vehicle infrastructure.
ie. When was the last time you walked across a Wallmart parking lot plaza to go to the store on the other side? Its usually quicker (and safer) to drive...
Yeah I visited France and Belgium a couple weeks ago and saw tons of these little dudes. It helps a lot if your cities are designed properly. In NA these would probably get totaled by monster pickups not seeing them.
Totally agree, our cars are too huge IMO, no need for it TBH. Its always great to travel the world (if you can). Nice to see the different ways people live.
where in Belgium if i may ask? Because they are not very common at all here imo.
Ieper. It was a really cute city with fantastic urban planning (although we only spent time in the downtown near the cloth hall). It was neat seeing the kids all riding their bikes to get everywhere. That being said, the tiny cars we saw were more common in France.
Okay, yeah Ieper is quite neatly planned for flemish standards. Poperinge too. I'm living more in the sprawl called Vlaamse Ruit: ghent, antwerp, Brussels, leuven... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flemish_Diamond?wprov=sfla1
I don't know if I would dare to drive them on american streets with all these oversized and overly powerful cars.
In Europe we always had a tendency to smaller city cars. There is a huge market for these smaller cars, that you never even had available to you in the US, because it never was profitable to offer small cars in America.
I just imagined seeing a subcompact car like the Ford Ka or Fiat 500 on an US Highway and thats seriously meme worthy. In Europe these cars are totally normal and a fixed part of traffic since forever. From there the step to the EV minicars aren't that big to be fair.
I've seen a few fiat 500s on the highways here, though more often the abarth(?) version. Not always though.