Do electric cars count as technology? They certainly don’t count as public transit. The Leapmotor S01 looks cool as hell and has a range of about 220 miles. It has a self driving feature on par with Tesla’s current “Full Self Driving” SAE Level 2 automation with a possibility of an upgrade to Level 3 automation, all while costing less than half as much as Tesla’s cheapest car (which doesn’t even include self driving at that price).
The problems aren’t cars per se, but basing your transit/logistics/fucking entire cities on them. The goal is to minimize the need of cars.
Exactly! Cars serve a number of roles, but being the primary method of travel is definitely not one of them. I think China is doing a great job right now in letting cars fill various roles in various forms, rather than trying to shoehorn them into the “this is a unit that has to do everything from be your daily commuter to your fun weekend sporty car to your own personal moving truck and everything inbetween” role that Westerners seem to demand. That’s why you’ll see such massive variation in style between sporty, fun cars like this to affordable and space-efficient trucks to small little glorified golf carts for the elderly to drive around. The thing I worry about there, is the possibility of it tipping over into cars becoming the main mode of shorter distance transportation rather than things like trams, metros, and buses.
I don’t mind driving, but I don’t want it to be my only mode of transit. For work, I could go in public transit, but I also am in a band and will need something to drive to shows for equipment. I all those vehicles to be electric of course.
It’s selfish, but when I had a car I really enjoyed just… Going out and driving into the middle of nowhere for hours. Like, just take it out and drive along a scenic trail for a really long ways. There’s something to be said for having the ability to just go like 300 km out into a place where nobody else really goes and just drive through a national or provincial park that’s really big. See a bunch of cool mountains or huge trees. Driving lets you see things at a scale that isn’t really possible with anything else other than a train, which would be a huge undertaking to just… Put a train line through like… Arches National Park in Utah or something, purely for the purposes of going through and going “oooh” at lots of neat rocks. One of my favourite experiences was getting to drive all of Route 66 with my dad a few years ago.
