All the ORMs I have used can easily do the equivalent of this

     select count(*) from cars where condition;

If programmers are doing what you say that they are then the programmers are the problem not the library.

Furthermore most ORMs (certainly any that I would consider using!) allow escaped SQL to be used - and if the query gets much more complicated than a couple of where clauses I consider using this feature.

A decent ORM used well allows programmers to program faster on the simple stuff but still write fast code for the complex stuff.