I disagree that they suck as an idea, they're just a misapplied one. Cars and combustion engines have done a lot for humanity. The bad ideas were: making excuses to sell as many cars as possible, investing in car infrastructure over mass transit, deceiving the public about the dangers of global warming once discovered, and for 50 years afterwards, ignoring/downplaying other externalities of fossil fuel extraction and use... Cars aren't really the villains in this story. It's just people being foolish and greedy, which they'll still be for the foreseeable future.