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Interesting. The lack of security is probably why I don't see them in the EU (would be surprised if they were legal to sell as cars). That said, I personally d

Interesting. The lack of security is probably why I don't see them in the EU (would be surprised if they were legal to sell as cars). That said, I personally don't own a car for ethical reasons, and I'd love this small one for shopping or just small trips on the weekends.

christkv 6y ago
The French have this car https://youtu.be/uUEKtOGmpVI https://youtu.be/uUEKtOGmpVI
- tibbydudeza 6y ago
  It would be perfect for us now just running the usual errands as since WFH we rarely travel outside our city borders on the national highways.
TheDong 6y ago
I'm curious to hear about the ethical reasons you have for avoiding car ownership. What are they?
- foepys 6y ago
  A typical car is standing around 90% of the day, if not more. It's a waste of space that could be used for trees, walkways, cycle lanes, etc. If we pooled our resources together and made renting cars easy and accessible, we'd have more space in cities for the people living there.
  - rapsey 6y ago
    The thing is that during those 10% most or at least a lot of them are on the road.
    - foepys 6y ago
      Commuting nowadays is broken. People commuting by car are hauling around 4 or more empty seats at 30 km/h along a highway full of other people doing the same, going into the same cities often into the same office districs. We could get rid of a lot of cars if we didn't drive around 4 empty seats and filled just one. Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        > Commuting nowadays is broken. People commuting by car are hauling around 4 or more empty seats at 30 km/h along a highway full of other people doing the same, going into the same cities often into the same office districs. We could get rid of a lot of cars if we didn't drive around 4 empty seats and filled just one. Unfortunately, highways require a certain minimum vehicle size. The best you could possibly do is have a short coupe with 2 seats. It wouldn't significantly influence the size of the vehicle but waste more resources for the few times where you need a 3-4 person vehicle. The savings to be had are way too slim. However, driving a pick up truck for your commute is absolutely a waste of resources because there are smaller and more aerodynamic cars that are commute worthy. >Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem. It's the only solution. Building a von Neuman architecture style city is absolutely stupid for society since the world is inherently parallel. There is no logical reason to have massive central work place districts. Each office building is a cpu core and each residential building is a memory chip in its own right. We don't need to put all the cpu cores next to each other and put the memory somewhere else. A distributed development pattern is significantly more efficient since data and computation are next to each other.
  - wolfretcrap 6y ago
    I often wonder without having a pickup truck and a car, how do Europeans haul heavy hardware stuff like MDF boards, 3x4 wood plank, steel pipes to their place. When I was in US I drove to nearest big box store, loaded my pickup and drove to my place. Easy, unfortunately no other country I've found such convenience and this makes me wanna go back to US.
    - jfk13 6y ago
      Most things I need from the hardware/DIY store, I can bring home in my car. With the seats folded down, 8-foot lengths of timber aren't much of a problem. For the rare occasions when that wouldn't be feasible, they'll deliver for a moderate charge. It would make no sense to pay all the costs of keeping an extra vehicle (or a much larger one than I generally need) just to avoid a couple of deliveries per year.
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
      Station wagons are popular, as are hatchback cars where you can fold down the rear seat. That will fit a fridge or bicycle. If you really need the space you just rent a van for the day. Gas is expensive on the old continent, so people really do not like to drive huge cars.
    - handelaar 6y ago
      People who need it for work have vans, which are an amazing invention with rooves and doors and which can carry pallets. Some have a trailer instead. People who need it barely once or twice a year for home take an estate car, rent one for a taxi, borrow a trailer off a friend, or get the store to deliver - because owning your own van or pickup just for that reason would be considered completely insane.
    - Theodores 6y ago
      Pickups trucks are an American phenomenon due to the Chicken Tax and how that sector of manufacturing is protected. European and Japanese manufacturers that trounce the big three in every other sector are forbidden to compete fairly in the land of the free when it comes to these bizarre pickup trucks that make little sense in normal countries. In the UK we have the Ford Transit van and people that can do things for you. You get stuff delivered or collected. The guy with the Transit van gets a high level of utilisation out of it. People can therefore have normal cars and SUVs. Or a bicycle. We don't have those man size trucks with dual tyres in the UK and certainly not at US prices. You can buy Ranger and Hilux size trucks and those are a bit too large for UK roads. In the US these would be toys, not man size at all. In the UK you can play a game watching cars and counting how many have more than one person in them. In the US you can count how many trucks are hauling stuff. They ain't.
  - ctdonath 6y ago
    A typical car is standing around 90% of the day, if not more. It's a waste of space [looks at personally-owned half-acre of forest] [looks at car] I own a car so I CAN own & preserve substantial undeveloped natural land. You get more city space by me not being there at all.
- knuthsat 6y ago
  Environmental issues. Same reasons I guess why Bitcoin is disliked. But most Bitcoin dislikers still drive a car, are careless with heating and cooling and eat steak at least once a day.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    That energy could have been used to produce more steaks, cars and heating. It might be careless but at least there is a logical reason for why these activities are highly energy intensive. Bitcoin is energy intensive for a fixed gain. It's like a war where people are fighting for a farm plot. The amount of food you can farm from that plot doesn't change just because you had a bigger war. Bitcoin will only process 7 transactions per second and every holder of Bitcoin is against changing that.
    - knuthsat 6y ago
      A nice comparison. So for Bitcoin we acknowledge the fixed gain but for our planet the gain is limitless, steaks, cars, and heating.
- megablast 6y ago
  Ha. Are you kidding? A million people are killed directly every year by cars. Many more are seriously injured and disabled. Another million indirectly due to air pollution. They are also the number one cause of micro plastics around waterways. Billions are spent on hospitals, doctors, nurses, ambulances, police to support all this death. Much more is spent covering our countryside on roads, that kill millions of animals every year. And encouraging urban sprawl means cities take up more space, destroying wild life habitat. This is just some of the awful things cars have bought to our world, not mentioned are wars, major spills, toppled governments, bribery, etc...
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Yet you seem to own a computer and presumably are ok with that?
    - Jonnax 6y ago
      If someone feels like making what they see as a positive impact by making a lifestyle choice. What's the point in saying: "But you do some unrelated thing???" Is the argument that there's no point in making a small difference, it's only worth it if you're 100% ideologically pure? Because I don't see where road deaths and microplastics in local rivers come into owning a computer.
      - azinman2 6y ago
        Computers themselves are a hodgepodge of resources extracted often horrendously from all over the world. Child labor for cobalt, various other rare earth products violently extracted with extreme acids scalding lands and polluting water sources, consuming vast quantities of oil to ship all these raw materials to then be assembled in massive factories with poorly paid workers, using terrible chemicals that can poison the workers and harm their babies… The reality is almost all of modern technology, materials, tools, and life have huge externalities. Us being alive consuming resources and emitting green house gases further pushes us towards terrible climate changes, while taking away space from nature before us. It just feels very arbitrary to stop at personal car ownership but maintain the benefits of all other externalities. Perhaps the OP also has many other resists to modern life under ethical guise. The computer is the one known exception here.
- tomp 6y ago
  There are no ethical reasons. Everyone who says this is just virtue signalling, by outsourcing the "car" to others (delivery drivers, grocery stores, police, hospitals, ...). Rejecting the car for ethical reasons should be accompanied by rejecting most of the modern society & infrastructure as well.
  - swimfar 6y ago
    How does not owning a car imply outsourcing those things? That's only true if you hiring a cab everywhere you go and order all your groceries to be delivered. If I bike everywhere I go, including the grocery store I'm not outsourcing cars. All the miles I would normally put on my car I put on my bike, or public transportation.
    - tomp 6y ago
      The grocery store uses cars to transport goods from farmer to the store. The whole supply chain uses cars (petrol, resources, poisoning air, causing accidents, ...), you're outsourcing to them.
      - betwixthewires 6y ago
        You know, if you think about it for 5 minutes, your point makes absolutely no sense at all. "Outsourcing" would be if his decision not to drive a car required him to pay people to drive cars on his behalf. That's the definition of the word "outsourcing". But you're talking about transportation that occurs whether he drives a car or not. The groceries you get at the store are driven there also. Him choosing not to drive a car literally has 0 impact on the transportation infrastructure of the supply chain. That is not outsourcing.
      - freeflight 6y ago
        The grocery store uses trucks to transport goods because doing it by bicycle/foot simply does not scale. But just because that part of the logistic chain involves ICE vehicles does not mean that every part has to involve ICE vehicles nor does it mean that people not using a car to do their shopping are "outsourcing" anything: The large-scale logistics happen regardless of how people get to the grocer, people getting there by foot/bicycle/public transport have literally zero influence on that end of the logistics.

christkv 6y ago

The French have this car https://youtu.be/uUEKtOGmpVI https://youtu.be/uUEKtOGmpVI

tibbydudeza 6y ago
It would be perfect for us now just running the usual errands as since WFH we rarely travel outside our city borders on the national highways.

TheDong 6y ago

I'm curious to hear about the ethical reasons you have for avoiding car ownership. What are they?

foepys 6y ago
A typical car is standing around 90% of the day, if not more. It's a waste of space that could be used for trees, walkways, cycle lanes, etc. If we pooled our resources together and made renting cars easy and accessible, we'd have more space in cities for the people living there.
- rapsey 6y ago
  The thing is that during those 10% most or at least a lot of them are on the road.
  - foepys 6y ago
    Commuting nowadays is broken. People commuting by car are hauling around 4 or more empty seats at 30 km/h along a highway full of other people doing the same, going into the same cities often into the same office districs. We could get rid of a lot of cars if we didn't drive around 4 empty seats and filled just one. Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      > Commuting nowadays is broken. People commuting by car are hauling around 4 or more empty seats at 30 km/h along a highway full of other people doing the same, going into the same cities often into the same office districs. We could get rid of a lot of cars if we didn't drive around 4 empty seats and filled just one. Unfortunately, highways require a certain minimum vehicle size. The best you could possibly do is have a short coupe with 2 seats. It wouldn't significantly influence the size of the vehicle but waste more resources for the few times where you need a 3-4 person vehicle. The savings to be had are way too slim. However, driving a pick up truck for your commute is absolutely a waste of resources because there are smaller and more aerodynamic cars that are commute worthy. >Or if we lived closer to where we worked but that's seems like a more complex problem. It's the only solution. Building a von Neuman architecture style city is absolutely stupid for society since the world is inherently parallel. There is no logical reason to have massive central work place districts. Each office building is a cpu core and each residential building is a memory chip in its own right. We don't need to put all the cpu cores next to each other and put the memory somewhere else. A distributed development pattern is significantly more efficient since data and computation are next to each other.
- wolfretcrap 6y ago
  I often wonder without having a pickup truck and a car, how do Europeans haul heavy hardware stuff like MDF boards, 3x4 wood plank, steel pipes to their place. When I was in US I drove to nearest big box store, loaded my pickup and drove to my place. Easy, unfortunately no other country I've found such convenience and this makes me wanna go back to US.
  - jfk13 6y ago
    Most things I need from the hardware/DIY store, I can bring home in my car. With the seats folded down, 8-foot lengths of timber aren't much of a problem. For the rare occasions when that wouldn't be feasible, they'll deliver for a moderate charge. It would make no sense to pay all the costs of keeping an extra vehicle (or a much larger one than I generally need) just to avoid a couple of deliveries per year.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    Station wagons are popular, as are hatchback cars where you can fold down the rear seat. That will fit a fridge or bicycle. If you really need the space you just rent a van for the day. Gas is expensive on the old continent, so people really do not like to drive huge cars.
  - handelaar 6y ago
    People who need it for work have vans, which are an amazing invention with rooves and doors and which can carry pallets. Some have a trailer instead. People who need it barely once or twice a year for home take an estate car, rent one for a taxi, borrow a trailer off a friend, or get the store to deliver - because owning your own van or pickup just for that reason would be considered completely insane.
  - Theodores 6y ago
    Pickups trucks are an American phenomenon due to the Chicken Tax and how that sector of manufacturing is protected. European and Japanese manufacturers that trounce the big three in every other sector are forbidden to compete fairly in the land of the free when it comes to these bizarre pickup trucks that make little sense in normal countries. In the UK we have the Ford Transit van and people that can do things for you. You get stuff delivered or collected. The guy with the Transit van gets a high level of utilisation out of it. People can therefore have normal cars and SUVs. Or a bicycle. We don't have those man size trucks with dual tyres in the UK and certainly not at US prices. You can buy Ranger and Hilux size trucks and those are a bit too large for UK roads. In the US these would be toys, not man size at all. In the UK you can play a game watching cars and counting how many have more than one person in them. In the US you can count how many trucks are hauling stuff. They ain't.
- ctdonath 6y ago
  A typical car is standing around 90% of the day, if not more. It's a waste of space [looks at personally-owned half-acre of forest] [looks at car] I own a car so I CAN own & preserve substantial undeveloped natural land. You get more city space by me not being there at all.
knuthsat 6y ago
Environmental issues. Same reasons I guess why Bitcoin is disliked. But most Bitcoin dislikers still drive a car, are careless with heating and cooling and eat steak at least once a day.
- imtringued 6y ago
  That energy could have been used to produce more steaks, cars and heating. It might be careless but at least there is a logical reason for why these activities are highly energy intensive. Bitcoin is energy intensive for a fixed gain. It's like a war where people are fighting for a farm plot. The amount of food you can farm from that plot doesn't change just because you had a bigger war. Bitcoin will only process 7 transactions per second and every holder of Bitcoin is against changing that.
  - knuthsat 6y ago
    A nice comparison. So for Bitcoin we acknowledge the fixed gain but for our planet the gain is limitless, steaks, cars, and heating.
megablast 6y ago
Ha. Are you kidding? A million people are killed directly every year by cars. Many more are seriously injured and disabled. Another million indirectly due to air pollution. They are also the number one cause of micro plastics around waterways. Billions are spent on hospitals, doctors, nurses, ambulances, police to support all this death. Much more is spent covering our countryside on roads, that kill millions of animals every year. And encouraging urban sprawl means cities take up more space, destroying wild life habitat. This is just some of the awful things cars have bought to our world, not mentioned are wars, major spills, toppled governments, bribery, etc...
- azinman2 6y ago
  Yet you seem to own a computer and presumably are ok with that?
  - Jonnax 6y ago
    If someone feels like making what they see as a positive impact by making a lifestyle choice. What's the point in saying: "But you do some unrelated thing???" Is the argument that there's no point in making a small difference, it's only worth it if you're 100% ideologically pure? Because I don't see where road deaths and microplastics in local rivers come into owning a computer.
    - azinman2 6y ago
      Computers themselves are a hodgepodge of resources extracted often horrendously from all over the world. Child labor for cobalt, various other rare earth products violently extracted with extreme acids scalding lands and polluting water sources, consuming vast quantities of oil to ship all these raw materials to then be assembled in massive factories with poorly paid workers, using terrible chemicals that can poison the workers and harm their babies… The reality is almost all of modern technology, materials, tools, and life have huge externalities. Us being alive consuming resources and emitting green house gases further pushes us towards terrible climate changes, while taking away space from nature before us. It just feels very arbitrary to stop at personal car ownership but maintain the benefits of all other externalities. Perhaps the OP also has many other resists to modern life under ethical guise. The computer is the one known exception here.
tomp 6y ago
There are no ethical reasons. Everyone who says this is just virtue signalling, by outsourcing the "car" to others (delivery drivers, grocery stores, police, hospitals, ...). Rejecting the car for ethical reasons should be accompanied by rejecting most of the modern society & infrastructure as well.
- swimfar 6y ago
  How does not owning a car imply outsourcing those things? That's only true if you hiring a cab everywhere you go and order all your groceries to be delivered. If I bike everywhere I go, including the grocery store I'm not outsourcing cars. All the miles I would normally put on my car I put on my bike, or public transportation.
  - tomp 6y ago
    The grocery store uses cars to transport goods from farmer to the store. The whole supply chain uses cars (petrol, resources, poisoning air, causing accidents, ...), you're outsourcing to them.
    - betwixthewires 6y ago
      You know, if you think about it for 5 minutes, your point makes absolutely no sense at all. "Outsourcing" would be if his decision not to drive a car required him to pay people to drive cars on his behalf. That's the definition of the word "outsourcing". But you're talking about transportation that occurs whether he drives a car or not. The groceries you get at the store are driven there also. Him choosing not to drive a car literally has 0 impact on the transportation infrastructure of the supply chain. That is not outsourcing.
    - freeflight 6y ago
      The grocery store uses trucks to transport goods because doing it by bicycle/foot simply does not scale. But just because that part of the logistic chain involves ICE vehicles does not mean that every part has to involve ICE vehicles nor does it mean that people not using a car to do their shopping are "outsourcing" anything: The large-scale logistics happen regardless of how people get to the grocer, people getting there by foot/bicycle/public transport have literally zero influence on that end of the logistics.