Cars are insane
Adamsdesk posted an article yesterday titled “Living Life Without Owning A Car”. And my immediate thought was “yes - because cars are insane!”
Why do I think that? Well first of all, if you’re using a car because you have to move heavy construction equipment around or you take your whole family to visit Grandma on a Sunday afternoon, that’s fine. I have no issue with that.
But most people use their cars primarily to drive themselves around, and nothing else. Maybe their purse.
A typical car that someone like me without a family might buy would be a Volkswagen Golf or something similiar (of course I had to pick a German brand, and Golf has been one of the most popular cars for literally decades at this point in Germany).
A quick look at Wikipedia tells me that this car in its bare minimum base configuration weighs 1255kg. My current weight is around 80kg.
So let’s do a bit of math here. If we take the numbers above, we can calculate that my weight is around 6,4% of the weight of the car (80kg/1255kg * 100), or put the other way round, this (small) car weighs almost 16 times as much as I do (1255kg/80kg).
In other words, If I get in this car to drive somewhere, more than 93% of the total mass that gets moved around is the car! And of course 93% of the energy that gets used for this (in the form of gasoline) is used to move the car around, not me. It’s not me who’s moving from place A to B and back, it’s a gigantic pile of glass and plastic and metal, and I’m just kind of along for the ride.
And keep in mind, these are calculations for a small car. If we get into the territory of sports cars, SUVs or Pickup Trucks, which are easily twice as heavy as a Golf, the numbers get even crazier. And we could do the same calculation for how much room a car takes up vs. how much room a person takes up and arrive at similar results.
And I haven’t even started talking about the fact that almost all public space available outside (in the city at least) is reserved for cars of course, and cars everywhere are parked on the sidewalk of course, because where else would you park your car? On the street? Don’t be ridiculous, that would block the way for other cars. Can’t have that!
Thinking about it, maybe my headline is not entirely correct. Maybe it’s not the cars that are insane. Maybe it’s our relationship with them.