It's a free country: people are free to choose to use autonomous cars over ebikes and buses and why wouldn't they? The emissions profile of a personal electric car being unaffordable[0] doesn't pass the sniff test.
[0]Fair economic taxation of externalities - considering current status quo.
I don’t particularly love cars or anything, and would be really happy to not have to have one, but there’s no way I’m going to try to rely on buses or bikes. I value my time, too much for buses and my life, and not being either frozen or covered in sweat too much for any sort of bike.
A car gets you from point A to point B quickly, reliably, comfortably, and with cargo. Nothing else does that, and we are willing to spend a significant portion of our income for it.
I think taxing carbon would be a great way to encourage people to reconsider how they travel, and would expect many people to pick things like those small EVs for urban usage if that became common.
Studies are all over the map but the ones that put it anywhere near 50% are all from China.
That’s not the argument being made. Everyone knows they pollute less per mile – but unfortunately the manufacturing is roughly half of the lifetime pollution from a vehicle.
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/27/ucs-study-shows-lifetim...
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...
This matters especially because consumers have been getting heavily marketed into getting massive trucks and SUVs, where the sheer size of the vehicle means the lifetime emissions are greater than a small ICE because the lack of tailpipe emissions can’t make up for that even if it’s powered entirely off of renewables.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be electrifying the vehicle fleet quickly but it’s buying time on the trip to zero emissions, not a solution. Buses and e-bikes get us much further because they don’t suffer from emissions the inherent inefficiency of automobiles.