Goon Boots posted:

Name every train

Goon Boots posted:

Oh you dont like car?

Name every train and bicycle

miniscule12 posted:

so uh, i've been having sex with my car recently. it's something really new and exciting and I was busting the biggest loads of my life 2 weeks straight. I love the smell of the exhaust, but every time I waited for the muffler to cool down to do the deed.

well, this time I decided to play hot. I know I know you never gently caress the car hot. but loving the car hot... sounded so hot. And I thought as long as I don't touch the metal I'm fine (I have a small dick)

I hosed up, and my dick got soldered shut and I had to go to the hospital. luckily your dick heals the second fastest of all your body parts. so after a week I can finally pee out of the hole again.

i'm also circumcised now, so all in all cars are a land of contrasts.

the sex ghost posted:

I have never read a single book and will never read any articles or theory. What is the accepted lefty position on car ownership and private transport in general. Is it submitting an application to the department of motor vehicles outlining why you need a car and getting one loaned to you on a case by case basis. Would the state be responsible for the maintenance of said vehicles. Will I get to have a go in a Yugo because that would be extremely cool.

I like cars but I also like public transport. Not sure of the best way to start reducing the number of privately owned cars but a good place to start would be to make the driving test more difficult and make people retake it every couple of years or so

Peanut President posted:

increase funding of public transit to like china levels and then make registering a car a pain in the rear end that you have to do every year

exmarx posted:

quote:

The sidelining of the environmental benefits of EVs aligns with the role Hummer and other gigantic SUVs have played in our environmental challenges. The Hummer, in all its militaristic aggressiveness, is the very embodiment of the wasteful excess that contributed to the climate crisis in the first place. Cars are inherently about projecting a self-image, and hundreds of thousands of Americans chose to project one of profound, pathological selfishness. The electrification of the Hummer is not a signal of climate progress. It is a declaration that it’s still OK to be an rear end in a top hat.

Bradsher’s book is a thorough examination of how the auto industry convinced millions of Americans to buy vehicles that were more dangerous (for themselves and other people on the road), got worse gas mileage, were worse for the environment, and got them to pay a premium for the privilege of doing so.

Car companies managed this remarkable feat because they ran—and continue to run—quite possibly the most sophisticated marketing operations on the planet. They knew what people really wanted: to project an image of selfish superiority. And then they sold it to them at a markup.

The picture they painted of prospective SUV buyers was perhaps the most unflattering portrait of the American way of life ever devised. It doubled as a profound and lucid critique of the American ethos, one that has only gained sharper focus in the years since. And that portrait is largely the result of one consultant who worked for Chrysler, Ford, and GM during the SUV boom: Clotaire Rapaille.

Rapaille, a French emigree, believed the SUV appealed—at the time to mostly upper-middle class suburbanites—to a fundamental subconscious animalistic state, our “reptilian desire for survival,” as relayed by Bradsher. (“We don’t believe what people say,” the website for Rapaille’s consulting firm declares. Instead, they use “a unique blend of biology, cultural anthropology and psychology to discover the hidden cultural forces that pre-organize the way people behave towards a product, service or concept”). Americans were afraid, Rapaille found through his exhaustive market research, and they were mostly afraid of crime even though crime was actually falling and at near-record lows. As Bradsher wrote, “People buy SUVs, he tells auto executives, because they are trying to look as menacing as possible to allay their fears of crime and other violence.” They, quite literally, bought SUVs to run over “gang members” with, Rapaille found.

Perhaps this sounds farfetched, but the auto industry’s own studies agreed with this general portrait of SUV buyers. Bradsher described that portrait, comprised of marketing reports from the major automakers, as follows:

Who has been buying SUVs since automakers turned them into family vehicles? They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities.

The evolution of the SUV from rugged military cosplay to the vehicle for everyone can be seen in its most potent form with the H2, which sanded down the H1's rough edges while retaining the hulking figure and bestial attributes.

This was a stark contrast with, say, minivan buyers. Those same studies found minivan drivers considered themselves parents of the neighborhood and not just their own children. They thought about how the design of the vehicle would enable them to do the things they did most frequently, such as transport lots of children or help senior citizens in and out of the vehicle.

But that’s not how SUV buyers thought. Bradsher quotes a Honda marketing executive as saying, “They are buying the image of the SUV first, then the functionality,” because, according to their research, SUV-buyers were “very concerned with how other people see them, rather than worrying about what is practical.”

Car companies marketed SUVs towards these people with advertisements featuring SUVs dominating roads, climbing boulders, and other extreme feats even though, by the auto industry’s own research, somewhere between one and 13 percent of SUV owners actually drove their vehicles off-road, and most of those who said they did considered flat dirt roads “off-roading.” In other words, auto companies spent billions of dollars on marketing every year to nudge people to buy over-engineered, inefficient, and expensive vehicles in order to allay irrational fears far out of touch with the lives they actually had.

This cynical marketing worked stunningly well. In 2019, the seven best-selling vehicles in the U.S., and 13 of the top 20, were either pickup trucks or SUVs (pickups, of course, now incorporate many of the same marketing tropes as SUVs from the early 2000s). According to the Detroit Free Press, pickups and SUVs now account for 60 percent of new vehicle sales.

Perhaps no vehicle exemplified this trend more than Hummer. Owned by AM General until GM bought the brand in 1999, Hummer embodied a specific time and place in the American psyche that embellished the SUV persona of overcompensation for insecurity and fear.

Michael DiGiovanni, a GM market researcher who persuaded GM to buy Hummer and ended up running its Hummer operations, told Bradsher the $100,000 vehicle was marketed to “rugged individualists” who were “people who really seek out peer approval,” a delicious irony considering how much other road users loathe Hummers. Like their general SUV-owning brethren, few used the vehicle for actual off-roading.

The H1’s successor and slightly smaller variant, the $50,000 H2, was similarly designed for “successful achievers” who are “daring in the sense they may take a big stock market position…but it’s really important for them that people tell them how successful they are.” These people are, DiGiovanni added, “teenaged boys at heart” who never performed military service but wish they had. To wit, DiGiovanni said prototypes had the word “FIRE” on the push-to-start ignition button, but GM’s lawyers made them take it off.

*

This would all be harmless fun if it was indeed harmless. Unfortunately, it was not. SUVs are worse for the world than smaller cars. The proliferation of SUVs has made our streets more congested, our roads more dangerous, and our environment more polluted for no good reason.

In 2000, several researchers used a video camera and a stopwatch to time how long it took thousands of vehicles to get through stop lights at two large intersections. They found, as the New York Times reported, people followed SUVs, pickups, and minivans at a greater distance than cars. As a result, a large SUV took the same amount of road space as 1.41 cars. The article quotes Professor Kara Kockelman of the University of Texas, one of the study’s authors, predicting traffic jams will get worse as more people switch to SUVs.

She was right. Traffic in virtually every American city has gotten worse, especially since the introduction of Uber and Lyft (both of which allow you to hail an SUV specifically as part of an upscale offering).

“Big cars are cumbersome,” Kockelman told Motherboard. “They do lumber through intersections and they cost everybody time.”

SUVs don't just cost society time. They cost lives. At the height of the original SUV boom in 2004, SUV occupants were 11 percent more likely to die in a crash than people in cars, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, despite the common conception that people in bigger vehicles are safer. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, from 1993-2003, car and SUV occupants in vehicles between one and three years old died at roughly similar rates; Bradsher explains in great detail this was because SUVs were inherently more dangerous due largely to deadly rollovers, but the higher position and stiffer frame of SUVs made them more dangerous to other road users, especially those in smaller cars, which evened out the death rate.

SUVs are more deadly for pedestrians, too. Last year, the Detroit Free Press revealed “the SUV revolution is a key, leading cause of escalating pedestrian deaths nationwide, which are up 46 percent since 2009,” affecting minorities in urban areas at a disproportionately high rate. And that’s without the threat of a silent Hummer accelerating to 60 miles per hour in three seconds.

Since then, SUVs have become safer for the people inside of them thanks to better design and a lower risk of rollovers. But they’re still dangerous to others. Starting in 2004 and continuing through 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, car occupants die at more than double the rate of SUV occupants. In other words, buying an SUV makes you more likely to kill other people, and yet people buy them in ever-increasing numbers. Rapaille’s reptilian brain concept has surpassed marketing theory and become a real-world experiment about how much Americans value the lives of others: not very much.

Equally profound has been the giant step back SUVs represented in CO2 emissions. A recent International Energy Agency (IEA) report found “SUVs were the second-largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions since 2010” other than the power sector.

Even though cars got much more fuel efficient over the last two decades—some small, cheap gas cars now get fuel economy on par with the first and second generation Priuses—the actual fuel economy of cars on the road has gotten worse because people are driving more SUVs. And SUVs get worse gas mileage because they’re heavier and taller, which makes them less aerodynamic.

According to the IEA, efficiency improvements saved some two million barrels of oil a day, but the rise of SUVs more than canceled those efficiencies out. Instead, SUVs were “responsible for all of the 3.3 million barrels a day growth in oil demand from passenger cars between 2010 and 2018.” The rise of SUVs in lieu of far more fuel efficient cars is a cautionary tale for those who hope we will innovate our way out of the climate crisis. The innovation occurred, but people opted out.

Xaris posted:

cars are good and helps marginalized bipoc elderly, dementia patients, and disabled people get around safely. not everyone can figure out a bus timeschedule and its pretty ableist to hate cars

grate deceiver posted:

im 36 and have never driven a car or even had a driving license. living in a country with a functional public transport owns, pack it up americailures

tacodaemon posted:

Xaris posted:

cars are good and helps marginalized bipoc elderly, dementia patients, and disabled people get around safely. not everyone can figure out a bus timeschedule and its pretty ableist to hate cars

Xaris posted:

cars are good and helps marginalized bipoc elderly, dementia patients, and disabled people get around safely. not everyone can figure out a bus timeschedule and its pretty ableist to hate cars

Relin posted:

cars are good. i dont want to make multiple grocery trips a week or carry everything in the heat/public transit, and all the good restaurants are several cities over where i live. yes high speed rail could help that but it'd still be a schlep, my friend in dc had to walk an hour to the bus to go to the train station every day

i'd like it if dead mall parking lots were dug up for green space though

bikes suck and being sweaty wherever you go is gross

Mayor Dave posted:

there's no such thing as a cool car

crush car culture

Beartaco posted:

I like my Toyota Corolla because I can and have lived out of it when I've needed to. Also driving is fun.

zegermans posted:

I remember watching a video that was celebrating 50 years of the NTSB by having a modern Malibu utterly annihilate a 50s Bel Air in a 40MPH crash and all the comments were talking about how it was a shame such a nice car had to be destroyed lmao

grate deceiver posted:

im 36 and have never driven a car or even had a driving license. living in a country with a functional public transport owns, pack it up americailures

Leroy Diplowski posted:

drat look at this sad sack of poo poo who lives several cities from a good restaurant. Dead mall parking lots and dead cities and dead people who were taken in the prime of life by a moment of distraction are all a direct result of car culture and car culture is a direct result of Americans and their "I want to never be inconvenienced and gently caress the long term impacts and all other people."

Don't say you'd like more green spaces. You got what you want. gently caress you.

Brrrmph posted:

Take the light rail Dale!! Nooo

Relin posted:

i think the dead mall is more from online ordering conglomerates but go off