Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
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Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
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No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
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No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
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No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
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No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
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He had some credibility with nerds because Tesla transformed the electric car market* and was making contributions to renewable energy storage, SpaceX revived the idea of doing more in space than just launching the occasional satellite or probe, and Starlink was pitched with the idea that it'd bring about globally accessable, high-speed low-latency internet. The result is that, because he is the face of Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink, he received the major of the credit for them. Nerds were willing to overlook the fact that he was an asshole for the contributions that his companies were making to science and technology because either "he's just shitposting" or "sometimes you have to take what you can get *shrug*". It wasn't until he bought Twitter that they realized that he's not just shitposting, he really is just like that, and that maybe he was causing more harm than he was doing good.
Source: My dad and I had a lot of respect for him up until he bought Twitter and started throwing a temper tantrum. My opinion of him was already waning when I saw the fit he threw about not being able to use his submarine and the bigoted shit he said on Twitter, but him buying Twitter broke any illusions that the either of us had about him being even a somewhat decent person. I've also seen others have similar experiences as well.
* seriously, does no one remember how the major car manufacturers were trying to bury electric cars? Does no one remember that one of the big reasons why we have so many electric cars now is because Tesla voluntarily released all their patents to the public in 2014?
Look I get it. Elon is an asshole. But the thing is he took his money and put it into two companies that people basically laughed out of the room as a joke. That is why he is worth so much now.
I agree that Tesla did a TON to popularize electric vehicles when the closest thing from a major American auto manufacturer at the time was probably the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt. That spark, largely ignited by Tesla, is likely a huge reason we have many of the options we do today.
It’s a shame major manufacturers like Toyota and Honda still won’t get onboard (yes, Toyota technically has a single EV offering as of this year, but good luck finding it and most reviews seem to find it underwhelming at best), but I think that fact further bolsters your point. If those two major players still can’t be bothered to get involved, I think it does indicate that what Tesla did during the last decade or so helped inspire others to get into the market that may not have otherwise.
That said, do we have any evidence that Tesla’s announcement of a plan to release their patents in 2014 really made any real difference? I am unaware of any of those patents being used by competitors anywhere, though it is entirely possible I am uninformed and I’d appreciate any sources you have.
I think one of the most glaring examples that the patent release may have had little to no impact is that the now-presumptuously-renamed “NACS” connector still isn’t used by anyone other than Tesla almost a decade on. In fact, SAE only announced that they would standardize the thing at the end of June this year.
Again, I freely admit that I agree Tesla deserves credit for finally creating a real, mainstream electric vehicle market. However, I am personally unaware of any benefits their 2014 “announcement of a plan to release their parents” has actually directly benefited the industry.
Ford, GM, Volvo, Nissan, Rivian, Polestar, and Mercedes-Benz have all announced that they will support NACS with an adaptor some time next year, and they will all have NACS ports in 2025.
Ok, but the comment to which I was replying was referring to when Tesla (supposedly) opened up their parents almost a decade ago so I’m not sure your comment addresses my question.
Honestly it's pretty shocking they are all essentially saying don't buy our cars for a year because our charging network can't compete with Tesla.
Tbh I don't actually have any sources for cars using the patent, it was my understanding however that a number of the patents were related to things like how the batteries were designed. As such, it makes logical sense to me that the explosion of electric cars with Tesla-like ranges would indicate that they were using Tesla's tech to some extent. However, after your reply I did look to see if there was any concrete information about whether or not anyone is using them, and found this article from 2015 in which Musk claims there are/were multiple parties using their patents. That's Musk's claim though, and he didn't provide any proof for it so take that with a grain of salt.
Secondly, something to note is that the Chevy Volt (2010) didn't launch until after the Tesla Roadster (2008) had already been released. What's important, imo, is that the previous full-electric cars were cars like the GM EV-1, Ford Ranger EV, Chrysler TEVan, Chevy S-10 EV, Honda EV Plus, or the infamous G-Wiz. All of these cars have something in common, which is that they were very slow, had very short ranges, took a long time to charge, and were fairly expensive and/or had a very limited run (or you had to be entered into a lottery to buy one). Some, like the GM EV-1 were forcefully recalled and destroyed after their makers got bored of them and declared them a failure. Finally, I like this quote from the Wikipedia article on the history of electric cars: