The way to "save the planet" is to not drive. Driving a 5000# vehicle around thinking you're doing good for the environment is just the marketing genius of the car industry in 2016.
In Germany, solar power is much more widespread, and so it is more likely that a German electric vehicle user would be riding in a vehicle charged from solar power. This is not to say anything about solar power or Germany, but rather to speak to the flexibility of the electric vehicle. Electric vehicles can depend on an infrastructure running on nuclear energy, or anything else, making it extremely adaptive to the ecological and energy needs of the future.
On the other hand, traditional combustion engine vehicles absolutely depend on fossil fuels, and they depend on a massive infrastructure that is specific to supplying fossil fuels. For a traditional combustion vehicle to shed its utter dependence on fossil fuels would mean finding an alternative and abundant fuel source to combust, and even then it would require a highly specific infrastructure to deliver those alternative fuels.
This is absolutely false. Lithium is not toxic to mine at all. It isn't even "mined".
http://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/12/lithium-mining-vs-oil-sa...
> Electric cars cause pollution
They cause zero pollution when you have solar panels on your roof and the car is properly scrapped after you're done with it.
> The way to "save the planet" is to not drive.
This is silly and impractical.
Realistically, at present most EV owners will not charge their cars from solar panels but from the utility mains and that means coal-generated electricity in many if not most areas.
Car manufacturing involves a tremendous investment of energy to mine and produce steel, aluminum, rubber, plastics, and electronics. Recycling itself consumes more energy, and in many cases raw virgin product is cheaper than recycled.
Not driving is impractical. Driving less, when possible, is worth considering.
Right now if you need to buy a car, the most environmentally friendly choice is probably a used (no new manufacturing) fuel-efficient conventional car.
Unless you factor in manufacturing.
There's also a ton of energy going into the cracking of crude into its constitutions parts before it even enters the supply chain for use in ICE vehicle.
Further, centralized power generation does a much better job at filtering and removing toxic elements from its discharge stream than gasoline/diesel vehicles filtering mechanisms do.
Notwithstanding the above, fossil fuel electric plants can be removed from the grid and replaced by cleaner energy solutions without having to replace or modify the consuming vehicle.
Here's a question for you. If suburbs are "the least optimal configuration", then why did urban sprawl occur in the first place? Why did so many people leave the cities and sought bigger homes on wider lots?
Modern urbanism is very opposed to urban sprawl because of those and many other reasons. Transport is just one aspect of it.
The alternate future would have seen everyone living in dense urban areas paying most of their wages as rent to the descendants of gilded age land owners.
edit: spelling
Because humans are irrational.
Gentler answer: Because of a variety of social, political, and economic pressures. For example, quick list because I really shouldn’t be spending time on this:
* Social: Running away from black people.
* Political: Spreading out the population in case of nuclear war. Accommodating population growth without the headache of having to tear down any existing building. Giving the white flight voting bloc the housing that they think they deserve.
* Economic: A fad in having housing physically separated from jobs and other commercial activities, like the current ridiculous fad of flat UI design in software. Objectively worse, but that’s what you get paid to build and favorable financing to buy.
What I care about is that suburbs are not sustainable. The climate change crisis is acute now, and I look at the per capita use of energy, water, and infrastructure (how many miles of roads per capita, how many miles of driving per capita, how many miles of water pipes per capita, how much water usage per capita), and on no measure are suburbs better than dense cities. Take away debt financing for the infrastructure, which eventually does stop working, and I don’t think most suburbs would physically survive.
If you moved cattle or poultry around like we move people, you'd get fined and put out of business. Deservedly so, because of the risk of spreading disease and wiping out whole crops of valuable animals. But people, not so important I guess.
If people are living farther away from their jobs, you're likely to get more congestion, not less.
Does this effect overcome the added amount of cars on the road from people who can now drive that wouldn't be able to before? I'm skeptical.
AFAIK none of the current autonomous control technology coordinates in any way with other vehicles or any kind of central control facility. Human drivers using Waze is probably the closest approximation of that to date.
There's the rub
