The solution to cars being shit isn't old cars. It's bicycles and trains. Lots and lots and lots of trains and bicycles.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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Fuck Cars
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Not everyone can ride a bicycle. I propose a shitton of tricycles, too, maybe some powered by solar-battery assist for those that have other physical issue with pedaling.
It can probably be assumed that by "bicycle", they meant the full array of pedal-powered vehicles including variants with all the kinds of accessibility options.
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I mean this clearly shows how rectangular cars were back then, which is not great for collisions. They should at least stay round.
Also i read a discussion recently about how EVs are heavier due to their battery (and that's supposedly bad for pedestrians when they get into a crash with the car), and i immediately had to think of how enormously overweight SUV vehicles are today, and people don't complain enough about how enormously overweight SUVs are. In fact some people praise it and say that the heavy mass is good for the car-driver of the SUV because when they get into a crash, they'll take less damage (while everyone around them takes more, btw).
Really shows how arguments are twisted and turned around when it's the oil lobby that stands to profit from it.
In the case of SUVs, it's not primarily the oil lobby, it's car manufacturers. Put simply, they get to charge way more than the extra materials costs, for a "premium" vehicle. They're making bank out of this shit.
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A thousand times this.
You used to look through the car in front of you to see the traffic in front of that car
To be fair, those cars with huge windows and great visibility handled rollover accidents by crushing the heads and necks of everyone in them.
Everyone driving SUVs to get to the office is dumb, but we don't want to go back to the days where the passenger cabin is the primary crumple zone either.
I remember being annoyed by a noticeable increase in the diameter of the cabin pillars of new cars that happened in the mid-late 00’s until I found out it’s because before then rollover protection was akin to prayer and new standards were the culprit for the change. Never complained about the reduced visibility since.
A young lady I worked with for a while was in a wreck years ago, before I met her, that resulted in a rollover in an older vehicle. It absolutely flattened the top of the cabin and pinned her inside with a badly shattered femur. From memory she said it was 4 hours before someone found her. Frankly; fuck that. Give me a new car with a bunch of safety considerations, thanks.
It's finally reasonable now that the cars are also watching for crossing vehicles. I have been a passenger in two different cars where the driver couldn't see a car they had to give way to at a roundabout as the A pillar completely blocked their view. Both would have collided had I not warned them
I don't get unhappy at people who stop unnecessarily at a roundabout, they might not have been able to see enough to be sure their way was clear
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My contribution - 1990 Volkswagen Vanagon. It is pretty large, but hilariously it's still smaller than a Chevy Tahoe lol.
And it probably fits more stuff!
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I hate the huge SUVs you see all over the roads, I have a 2021 Seat Leon FR PHEV hatchback, and around here the Kia EV9 is really popular.
While not as large as the stupid Ford F-150s, the EV9 is fucking huge.
The bonnet of an EV9 reaches almost up to my Leon's roof:
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/seat-leon-2020-5-door-hatchback-vs-kia-ev9-2023-suv/
It should be illegal to have a car with the headlight at the eye level of a driver of a standard WV Golf type car.
Bonnet height for private vehicles should be tightly regulated, they are a key contributer to lethality in car accidents yet increasing every year. I could imagine some steep increase in taxes (at least at purchase if nothing else) the further you deviate from a defined reasonable height. People do care about money, make lethal asocial choices more expensive.
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station wagon superiority
i need an electric station wagon goshdarnit!!
Back before any good electric vehicles I drove a station wagon and I was following all the EV news in the hope of converting it to electric (the V6 ecotech was thirsty).
There was an Australian consortium of car industry companies proposing that the Australian car industry could continue, specialising in electric muscle cars, and their demo was the sedan version of the same model as mine
That came to nothing
Then there was the US company AC Propulsion which was producing kits for converting a car to electric, but the lead acid batteries of then would prevent the car carrying a load
That got funded by Musk and became Tesla. Tesla has never made a wagon
I think Chinese Volvo sells a wagon, but I don't really need one anymore
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Imagine if speed limits were variable based on a car's weight and lethality. Only small cars are allowed to go fast.
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Yes!
Finally a nuanced take in this community.
Cars wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so oversized
Cars wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so oversized
And if there weren't so many of them.
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“Fuck cars”, like “ACAB”, is often a quick tagline to a problem people understand is more nuanced. I don’t think so many people here would literally like all cars in existence to be crushed in a heap.
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Smaller cars will continue to kill a few billion animals yearly. They will also continue to kill around a million of humans every year, or about one human every 30 seconds.
The area covered by parking lots is mostly impervious and contributes to flooding as well as heat islands. Cars and parking lots make cities hotter and are worsening climate change. They also contribute to noise pollution. And no, electric cars are not better for noise because at highway speed they are as noisy as fossil fuel cars, and at low speed, their pedestrian warning system is also louder than fossil fuel cars.
I can be nuanced and understand that some people will always need a car, but most people in the world live in a town, a suburb, or a city, and the existence of the vast majority of those cars cannot be justified, whatever their size. Of course smaller cars are desirable. Electric cars are desirable A mix of electric and smaller would be better than status quo. But fewer cars is even more desirable.
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In a surprising reversal, the meme got it right (SUVs, 90s) and the title did not (SUV's).
Even when dealing with acronyms and numbers, " 's " indicates possession.
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Not with those crash safety test results. I’ll take a modern sedan if I’m going to have a car
You'll never convince me that SUVs don't exist solely to sell what is effectively a minivan to deeply insecure men.
Deeply insecure men buy pickup trucks with hoods I can barely see over. SUVs and their perception of "safety", storage space, and ride height are why women are the primary purchasers.
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My humble contribution
I mean, it might be small but it got worse gas mileage, was heavier and would kill you in a fender Bender.
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As a full time walker and bicyclist, what I have learned is that virtually no one is up to the responsibilities of operating a car or truck. Humans do not deserve to drive, and the sheer volume of traffic accident deaths every year is a reminder of that (let alone the far greater volume of traffic related animal deaths).
I do like my crumple zones, but would like modern cars to downsize like they did in the malaise era.
Smart fortwo is all most need. 4door is for afyer kids
Oh, that Ford Escort model was truly Fix Or Repair Daily.
God, how bad it was. The shittiest and most unreliable car I ever had.
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I enjoy my small shitbox (2007 KIA Rio5 hatchback) and wish I had a smaller shitbox to commute in
One of the biggest perks is the fact that my little shitbox is FIXABLE by sane people with standard tools! No special tools, parts are literally everywhere, and all the parts are DIRT CHEAP. The engine is in Hyundais and KIAs from 1989 to 2011. If it's a 1.6L 4 cylinder made by those 2 companies it's the same engine between ALL OF THEM.
EDIT: The biggest difference is the exhaust routing. The midpipe on the Hyundais is straight, the KIAs it's got a bump.
Meanwhile me back in University:
Ditch cars
Im in love with cars in Bud Spencer movies. Small, neat. The Beatle and Bully of VW. So cute and compact
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It was always an american disease from my perspective. But it slowly infected Europe. Now every goddamn household drives a fucking huge ass minibus/truck/Fucking Hummer sized family wagon to work.
The worst part is when they take up so much parking space that the lots next to them are practically unusable because they fuck you, I needed this bigass milonstertruck for casual commotion.
This is a nice thought, but if that older car hit a wall at the same rapid speed as any of those modern cars, everyone in it dies while the people in the modern car walk.
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