I feel like leaving the subject of whether automobiles are good/bad as something that cannot be determined is just shying away from the question, and the possibility that the answer to it is that it is generally a bad thing. When you design cities and cultures and entire lifestyles around the assumption that everyone has or must have a car, all the unintended consequences of the automobile become bigger—necessary places aren’t walkable, air becomes so polluted you can’t jog outside, you create huge market demand for cheaply produced energy, and so on.

I’d like to hear anyone’s thoughts to the contrary? Are there any benefits that are bigger than the cons?

A couple of easy ones:

The ability for people to travel to so many places and engage in the human experience in ways they otherwise never could or would. The expansion of humans' radius to get together, be together, work together, exchange ideas, make love, and make families.

Because humans were able to be with so many more humans, I would argue that knowledge, learning, and thought, took place at a level that's orders of magnitude greater than it would have been otherwise. And if you subscribe at all to the idea of the butterfly effect, it's impossible to begin comprehending what mankind wouldn't have if the car hadn't existed. Would we have the cure to as many diseases? Would the rate of poverty have declined so profoundly? Would the Internet exist?

Simply put, yes. The same effects could have been accomplished with extensive public transportation, subsidized to the point of being free for the same cost as the car and road subsidies. And with far greater positive effects on poverty, due to providing a smaller barrier of entry. Also likely far more free money and labor being diverted to more creative endeavors, due to the freedom from funding being forced to be allocated to a car for basic needs.