this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
151 points (98.7% liked)
Autonomous Vehicles
118 readers
85 users here now
Autonomous Vehicles is a community dedicated to the news, discussion and exploration of autonomous vehicles and how we as a society, will embrace this futurology today!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because they still have all the disadvantages of cars and they don't really bring anything of value. A car is dangerous for the people around not in a car, inefficient at transporting people, takes valuable space, and pollutes the air with tire and brake dust particles. They are also noisy. Electric cars won't change that.
In the case of Tesla, FSD is just a gadget for car owners that somehow don't want to drive cars.
In the case of Waymo, they are not a solution to relieve transit in busy cities. There's even more cars now, but without a driver and sometimes they get stuck and still need to call for help.
If you want me to get mildly excited for an autonomous vehicle, show me a train or a metro. Otherwise, if people want to get to places without driving, we already have solutions for that, but apparently it's better to ask everyone to buy a private autonomous vehicle that requires a driving license and won't work in the country side, rather than speak of the horrors of the T word.
EDIT: I know which community I'm in and didn't want to get into this but I was asked. Self driving cars are also wasting energy because of the computing power needed to process all the stuff that a human brain was already processing "for free". Now, instead of having billions of cars that require significantly more energy than transit to move around one or maybe two humans, we will have billions of cars that requires even more energy to plot courses and drive the individual cars around.
Electric vehicles release fewer brake dust particles, as they can use regenerative braking. Brake pads are really only needed when an unexpectedly sudden stop is needed (emergencies).
EVs are also quieter, as others have already pointed out.
I don't want to mention the other major output of regular cars versus electric cars, either.
(Arguments about just shifting the location of burning aside, we are specifically talking about the effect on nearby people)
Indeed, electric cars may produce less brake dust particles than an ICE. However they are also heavier than ICE and the tires will shed more particles over time.
And electric cars are also somewhat less noisy but they cannot beat the laws of physics. You can still hear an electric car coming because of the noise tires make on the roads over certain speeds. The higher the speed, the noisier it is. Even if all the cars on a multi lane highway were all electric, it would still be noisy and difficult to have a conversation nearby. A six lane highway filled with electric cars will still need a sound wall.
There are also regulations to have electric cars make artificial noise to be "safe" at low speed, and some sound like they are constantly honking at low volume.
Like, yes, those two points are marginally better with electric cars, but it's not much. And it doesn't cancel all the other negative issues with cars.
Playing devil’s advocate here: trains and busses are loud af.
But they do. Electric vehicles are much much quieter than the average ICE car. The gap is smaller for newer ICE vehicles, but it's still there.
Agreed, but it doesn't mean they don't have their place. In an ideal world, if would result in more car sharing. In reality, they provide the ability to mobilise the disabled as well as people that can't afford cars in places with poor transport links.