Society's got priorities wrong.
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most car travels are 1 person or sometimes 2 person
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the majority of car travels are quite short, less than 40km.
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many car travels are just to get some groceries or drop of a little package or just say "hi" to someone, carrying nothing but themselves.
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cars are fucking expensive, to buy and to maintain
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accidents become way worse with heavier vehicles
Microcar is a valid answer to all of these, while still being sheltered from weather.
How are urban places (i'm in Belgium) with almost permanent super heavy road traffic congestion, bad climate statistics, high polution values, very limited available space left, no self-sustaining energy production and high traffic accident statistics still pooring in billions and billions in subsidies year after year into "regular" big heavy SUV-like vehicles instead of these? It's beyond my comprehension. The only real valid reason i somewhat get is the collective scare of being in a crash and not wanting to be in the smaller vehicle. We could save the climate, we choose not to.
- MICROLINO: 17.990 €
- OPEL ROCKS: 8.699 €
- CITROEN AMI: 7.790 €
- RENAULT TWIZY: 13.000 €
- FIAT TOPOLINO: 9.890 €
A lot of people here casually spend more on a sunday racing bike every few years for fucks sake.
In Japan there is something similar they have a class of cars called kei car and it is not as small but close and have limited engine size like under liter for combustion variant and some other rules that they have to comply and those are less taxed and much cheaper but what suprised me at least in cities i visited last year still majority of the cars there was the regular ones
I have looked it up on wiki and it looks amazing i would maybe own a car myself if we have something similar here in europe or maybe not because i live in old and small city and here you can go almost anywhere by walking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car
Those look interesting as they keep their utility as a car (trunk, four seats, ...).
Taxation is a complicated thing, many different subsidies etc exist. I think here in general people are taxed higher % when getting a microcar than a big one. For sure if it's the employer leasing a car for the employee which is a very common thing here.