Prepare for a world without cars, advises Ivan Hoffman. Optimists rely on miracles

IVAN HOFFMAN’S VIEW Past generations dreamed of futuristic travel possibilities and even managed to get to the moon. Today, heralds of progress want to travel mainly on foot and, most of all, virtually – with their finger on the map. According to Ivan Hoffman, carbon-free electric cars are only a temporary compromise.

Even if a person had the ability to see around a corner, or even around multiple corners, it probably wouldn’t help him. What’s around the corner doesn’t matter if it’s around the corner. Also, we have a past that lets us know that much of what was taken for granted had no future. Nothing is more natural today than motoring. It’s just that the aversion to motoring has become something natural. So what has no future?

The European Parliament has just approved an agreement among EU member states, according to which the production of cars with internal combustion engines will end in 2035. From what we know about electric cars today, it is clear that electric cars will not be a cheaper or more environmentally friendly alternative to normal cars. By the way, politicians’ aversion to gasoline and diesel is already destroying the environment today, as the vehicle fleet is aging. New, ecological cars are overpriced, and electric cars are practically unsellable without a subsidy. And there’s also the popular joke about the exhaust of an electric car being the chimney of a coal-fired power station.

The emphasis on electromobility is actually an attack on mobility. The dream of emission-free cars is the dream of a world without cars. According to skeptics and realists, decarbonisation will lead to a brutal restriction of available individual mobility, i.e. to a restriction of freedom. As for optimists, they rely on miracles. Perhaps someone will invent a cheap and eternal battery or cheap energy from renewable sources, which are expensive and harmful today.

The twilight of motoring is preceded by the twilight of the automotive industry. It starts with limiting production due to missing components, such as chips. High costs will drive up prices, higher prices will drive down demand, and when there is nowhere to stockpile the unsold unsold cars, the production lines will grind to a halt and the last one will go out.

After generations that dreamed of traveling in futuristic hovercraft and space tourism, comes a generation that yearns for a world that will be walked on. Even in a happy, healthy future, people will travel, but preferably virtually, with their finger on the map.

Of course, the car is not a sacred cow. Man was here before the automobile and will be here after it. Harmful mobility can be spared for future generations by artificial intelligence, thanks to which the global home office or remote anything will rule. If we were given a peek around the corner, we might find that motoring will become the same anachronism that we consider the horse-drawn carriage to be today.

Nowhere does it say that a person is predestined to add gas. Generations come to speak, solving how to stop man in his expansiveness. Young people stick to the asphalt, and in the column of cars that they stop in this way, there are used cars, but also those that meet the strictest emission standards. And what is symbolic, they also stop electric cars: as if they want to indicate to us that they will completely eliminate the morbid mobility that is against nature. That it does not end with combustion engines, but only begins.

In any case, we can’t see around the corner. Therefore, we cannot rule out that after the generations that will consciously walk, a new, progressively conservative generation will not come and invent the gasoline engine!

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