Also, you know what else goes comically over budget and over time? Car infrastructure projects! But when talking about highways it’s “an investment for the country’s mobility and ultimately its economy” yet with trains it’s “a pointless money sink that will never succeed due to this one very commonly experienced setback.”
(Full disclosure I’m not in the UK, I’m annoyed at him for the people there too, especially since their politicians’ attitudes toward high speed rail seem pretty similar to attitudes in Canada where I am.)
If you only have the option to drive and it looks like it will never change where you live, then yes, driving electric is better than driving an ICE car. You’re not the problem for needing to live your life with the limited options you have access to. However, that does not mean the intrinsic problems with cars disappear the instant they become electric, and this meme is mainly meant to respond to the techbro people who think just because electric cars exist now it makes transit obsolete or it solves literally everything wrong with cars in general, and use that to actively resist public transportation or attempt to turn public opinion against it. I should have added additional context to make that clearer.
Also, unironically, e-bikes are more fun than cars. You feel the acceleration much more on a bike than a car despite moving slower, and the breeze going by you feels pretty nice too.
Every generation does this. The boomers had their fair share of dumb slang terms as well but for some reason everyone loves to hate the next generation for doing the exact same thing.
And god forbid you point out the fact that this attitude among consumers is exactly the reason these companies are brazen enough to pull this shit. People don’t want to hear how their attitudes around instant gratification and focus on convenience over absolutely all else just might have consequences.
Except EVs still have a significant carbon footprint from their manufacture. So do train cars and buses, but to transport everyone in cars instead of public transportation would require orders of magnitude more materials, and therefore a much higher carbon footprint. Not to mention the poor land use that car dependency causes, which both leads to deforestation and impedes reforestation, which is a further climate change contributor.