and it is the most pathological shit I have seen in a while. Good god, the answers read somewhere between internalized advertising and an oedipus-complex about a machine.
Hence, I shall cite you some example so you, too, may look into the abyss. If you think some of it is worded with way too much pathos, rest assured that's all in the original comments, too.
"Why do you have an emotional bond with your car?"
There is no goal I cannot achieve with my car [...] I am in my own world. [...] The seat is really comfy.
The car is freedom to me. I can get together some friends and drive around the forests on a sunday.
Like other people like rollercoasters, I like the car for it's speed and acceleration. [...] Other people have touched on the risk part of it, and I like the risk of driving quickly, it's like parajumping. The goal however is not to endanger other people. I am a car enthusiast and I'm not ashamed about it.
For me, the car means getting everywhere quickly. This first started when I turned 18, where I now only needed 15 minutes to get to work. [...] I feel way safer doing 180kph on the Autobahn than on a bicycle, because I have way better control over my car. I will drive my Diesel as long as it's possible, even if it costs 5€/L.
A:Same as OP, I am uncomfortable when people show me their new car and I have to fake enthusiasm about it. I always ask "Is that a 1,4L Engine?". I don't even know what it means.
B: You should ask if it's a 2L, 1,4L is an insult to most cars.
Did your parents never drive across the country with you when you were a child?
I like my car because: it's reliable
I never had one for this long
we have experienced and seen so much together
because it never causes trouble
because it's reliable
because it's comfortable
because it has seats that are better than my couch
because it has a great sound system
because it radiates calmness
because I talk to it sometimes
because it looks great with summer tyres.
I have Kids, 5 at that. The Car is like our second living room.
Freedom. I come from the country and cycling more than 5km was never an option for me.[...] Also Price. I know, difficult topic, especially if you consider all the costs of owning a car. It was still cheaper to get into the next big city in my 90s Fiesta and two friends than it was taking the train.
For me, the car was one of the places I couldn't be disturbed. Music up, I am not allowed to check my phone, I got out of the house.
My car is freedom. For my body and my mind. I leave every day life behind me, no matter if I bomb down the autobahn at 250kph or do 50kph listening to my favorite music while cruising through the countryside
It doesn't matter which car you are comfortable in. A car means independence. I took the train for 5 years while studying, never again.
There's some comments there pointing out how fucked the entire thread is, at least.
EDIT:
They keep coming, folks
There is currently nothing more beautiful than to wash my car on a warm, sunny Sunday. Once everything is perfectly clean and glistening in the sun, I just feel like I have just created Art ;).
[in a thread discussing a general speed limit on the autobahn, suggesting people who want to drive fast hit a racetrack] This is just the typical "gO tO a RaCeTrAcK". So far, there is no speed limit on the Autobahn and once you hit 180kph, every 10kph more is exciting. Sometiomes, someone cuts you off or gets on the autobahn, you just quickly accelerate and get away. That can be enough adrenalin for a day, that's just part of it, you don't need to go to a racetrakc for that. You're not endangering anybody with it, thats just forced scenarios.
I'm a student and I really like my car for the following reasons:
It's the first big investment I bought myself (okay, my Dad helped)
I have to move a lot and the car is the only constant over changing appartements
freedom
When you drove your Golf 2 from Party to Party in 1995, fucked on the hood, the backseats and behind the wheel and always had two friends with you with some cassettes that everybody knew by heart, that drove you to every festival in the area, when you've seen practically every country in west europe and northern africa and spent years with at least one hour a day behind the wheel, you must have a miserable life if you don't have an emotional connection to your car. You get attached to your Appartement, or are you HOMELESS?
A: Why does anybody like bicycles is the question?
OP: It's really hard to kill someone with it, it's quiet, it keeps you fit and it doesn't take up as much space nor pollute the enviroment. Yet it is still individual mobility, faster than being on foot and you don't have parking woes. Oh, and it's fun. Exercise sets free Dopamine.
A: You can kill someone with a bicycle. The risk of being killed is way higher. Fun is something else to me. Driving a car for fast for a long period of time is also exercise (of course only where it's allowed). Motorsport > Cycling.
We're materialists, and we should have a materialist understanding of how people view cars. Right now they're extremely useful in all but the densest urban areas and a necessity for most rural folks. "My car is freedom" sounds goofy until you put yourself in the shoes of someone in a small town that's 10+ miles from everything. In that situation, you can't have a normal adult life -- think going to work, or to the store, or on a date -- unless you have a car. Even in a city large enough to have real public transit, a car is the difference between doing things on your own time with storage/transport space and doing things slower, on someone else's schedule, with no more than what you can personally carry.
Of course people associate the tool that allows them to easily meet those needs with freedom, independence, and all sorts of positive emotions. That's the material base to all of this, and what we eventually have to provide.
I'm not going to claim a car isn't the pragmatic solution for a lot of people as it stands, thread has those comments and I didn't cite any of those for a reason.
Calling the car your second living room, using the autobahn as your personal racetrack or ascribing a radiating calmness to a car has nought to do with freedom or indepedence. That's just terminal car brain.
And I can see how people arrive there in a culture that yells at you at in every possible way that you need to buy a car, don't get me wrong. It's still not a good thing and any change to the status quo must now fight what has become basically a replacement religion. You cannot possibly argue with these people anymore (believe me, I have tried a lot) because any change to the status quo is a direct attack on their perceived freedom, or on their most treasured object.
The underlying theme in all the posts (taking into account parts and posts I didn't translate to here) is basically that all the negative externalities that come along with the car do not register to many people. It's entirely ego-driven and the frame of discussion isn't about whether any change would be a good idea to society, it's entirely about taking freedom and fun away from those who are way too attached to their car.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ti1l
SNL from the 90s was alright.
You can kill someone with a bicycle. The risk of being killed is way higher.
I wonder why the risk of being killed is higher. I guess we'll never know.
Listen, if you have a better idea for traffic safety than a perpetual arms race of increasingly large vehicles, I'd like to hear it!
If getting hit by your car wouldn't immediately toss me under your grill and grind me to paste, your car isn't big enough sweaty
I mean, we're talking about Germans here, of course they have weirdly emotional relationships with their big loud machines
Probably some of the only emotions they even have
Car enthusiast events, especially the non-corporate ones, are some of the most community-driven and cool things I've ever been to. Car people just want to go out in the sun, drive their car somewhere nice, chill out with other people with music and vibe.
The car itself is a problem but I kinda get a lot of these attitudes. I own a bike and I feel the same way about bikes if I'm honest. The bike is freedom to go anywhere and quickly, getting things for my bike and looking after my bike makes me feel good.
It's not really the car itself in my opinion, it's what the car enables them to go and do that they care about. Same thing with my bike really.
The problem is of course that the car as a general means of transportation is not a sustainable practice and all the associated negative costs, especially here in germany, are shouldered in large part by people who do not benefit from it at all.
Sure, I like tinkering on my bicycles. I like riding them. The thing is this doesn't require the planet to die for my pleasure to the extent if you do the same thing with cars.
When I say bike I don't mean bicycle I mean vroom vroom bikes, I'm not in a position to ride a pedal bike everywhere, I have a moped and something a bit more sporty. I agree with all the criticisms, I just don't think this is going to be effective by attacking on "car people" nor do I think it's going to be constructive. They feel this way for the same legitimate reasons I feel about my bike.
Riding my bike gives me joy. Making a sharp turn and feeling my weight pushing into the banked turn, hearing the derailleur click as I shift gears to accelerate, pedaling furiously up a steep hill, taking whichever path I please and going off the path, it's joyous. Sometimes riding it makes back aches go away. Even if I'm commuting and get stuck in traffic I enjoy the moment of being on my bike. Most car operators cannot say that. And my bike costs 3% of the resources to produce and <1% of the resources to operate that a car does.
This shit gives me mixed feelings.
I grew up a "car guy", I restored cars with my dad, brought cars back from the dead with engine replacements, been the personal mechanics to friends with too much money, etc. The only time I really feel at peace is either elbow deep repairing a car, or taking one around a mountain road and losing myself to the curves and the way the machine moves and operates. I think it might be in part some autism, the love of interfacing and controlling the machine. I drive a slightly sporty hatch with a 6 speed and it generally improves my mood every day. Yeah I have to go to work and be miserable, but there's the bookends of rowing gears and watching the boost gauge.
That being said, fuck I wish I had public transport options that didn't take 500x the amount of time driving does. Want to go into the city? 25 minutes by car or almost 2 hours on the worlds slowest train that stops running at 11PM. Want to go drinking with friends? Uber, DD, or decipher the weird suburban bus schedule. Want to visit family but not drive 9 hours? Sorry sucka, amtrak costs as much as a plane ticket and wont get you within 100 miles of your destination.
The psychology of someone who loves cars isn't a personal failing. Its all people have when they're living in a place that's isolated by design and no effort is made to unisolate it. The car isn't inherently bad. The fact we allowed our cities to be shaped by the car is.
Okay but like, how does society square the difference between car guys enjoying driving and the monumental cost required to facilitate this? Like the only way outta this is to make it rich people toys and at that point, I'm guessing about 90% of car guys can't afford it anymore anyways.
Huh, yeah, I can fuck with all car guys become like Ambulance Drivers or whatever.
Its already becoming a rich guys activity. I've got an old mustang being stored at the inlaw's place because I cant afford car rent on top of normal rent. I work on my friends cars because he responds to depression and multiple sick family members with retail therapy. I did buy an old motorcycle so I have something to fix up, which can fit in said friends shed. Being into cars is really the kind of activity that grows to fit the container, money wise. You can get by on the cheap. I don't like going fast, I just like to fix-n-cruise.
I'm not sure that cars will ever be fully replaced in rural areas. The cost for effective public transport in rural areas would be prohibitive and you won't get people to move out of the country side without USSR scale job relocation policy. Even then, someone would have to be in rural areas.
I'm pretty sure to order gasoline would be a specialized service in the future if electric vehicles truly replace them. If gasoline cars are an honest minority of vehicles then emissions aren't much of a worry at that scale anyway.
Also, i'm not trying to be a debate guy right now. I genuinely like to challenge myself a bit with this because I know better, I know cars aren't good in general. But they're also the cure to my constant alienation of labor, a machine I can change with my hands, see the improvement, and enjoy the fruits of the labor.
I’m not sure that cars will ever be fully replaced in rural areas.
I agree with this, but the dependency can be lessened a lot.
I mean, I don't know about the rural US to make claims there, the problem here in Germany is once the country was converted to car-centrism, all the infrastructure in the villages died out. There used to be like small shops, a local handyman and whatever which staid afloat by supplying things of need to one village and maybe the few adjacent ones before you hit the next bigger one.
They all fucking died when everybody started driving their car to the retail Supercenters (or worse, clogging up the cities) and just ordered the mechanics for w/e to come in from the city.
Suggest however, that we build a country that isn't as car-centric and all the same people who decry the lack of infrastructure in the countryside will tell you that's impossible.
Again germany specific and probably not to be applied internationally, there is an insane number of train tracks here that are good to go barring cutting down some bushes (allthough, you know, just let the train do it), there is just no service on them because everybody drives their car. And like, 90% of the people in any given village just go to the same city anyways. They're predestined to be serviced by a train line, but as there is no state mandated flexible time and the car is kept cheap by taxes, everybody uses that.
That is a really good point. There were whole economies on a micro scale in rural areas that have been mostly pushed out for the bigger big box mart highway town an hour out. Now the only shops you see in the sticks are tractor dealerships and welders. Things walmart and others cant supply.
A counterpoint to consider is that all of Germany is smaller than Texas. I've done the equivalent of driving from Frankfurt to Berlin and back in a day. Its not unheard of for people in rural areas in the US to need to drive for over an hour to the nearest hospital or shopping center. There's smaller towns in between but your options begin to get very limited.
Overall I would prefer the return of small strong towns that allow for walking or at the very least smaller vehicles like bikes, scooters, little hatches, etc.
:yikes-1::yikes-2::yikes-3:
For me, the car was one of the places I couldn’t be disturbed. Music up, I am not allowed to check my phone, I got out of the house.
That's the only one I can relate to. The rest of this is just pure ideology. "Freedom" bullshit isn't confined to Amerikkka.
I was a bit of a car guy growing up and there are some things I enjoy about driving, but I really wish I could just cycle or take a train for 100% of trips. These people are oblivious to the social cost.
I think it suffices to say, there ain't really a spot in germany where you're that far away from like, a park. Or just nature. There's not really an equivalent to the miles wide suburbia you literally can't get out of without a car.
Dude could've just got on a fucking bicycle and leave his phone at home. This whole thing is just applying car to a problem and then retroactively deciding why that was a good idea.
Like other people like rollercoasters, I like the car for it’s speed and acceleration. […] Other people have touched on the risk part of it, and I like the risk of driving quickly, it’s like parajumping. The goal however is not to endanger other people. I am a car enthusiast and I’m not ashamed about it.
This is the most honest thing I have ever heard a car person say. "I like cars because they go fast" is all I needed to hear.
Also "The goal however is not to endanger other people". We're really setting the bar high here
Idk, cars are pretty cool. Socially costly, yeah. But the experience of driving and owning a car is amazing. It's a shame it's not practical for everyone, and that trying to force it to be so creates a horrible environment to live in.
I don't see an issue. I'm tired of unreliable, crowded and exhausting (as a disabled person) public transportation. There's no other way for me to get some semblance of independence.
The thread has genuinely left me with the impression our traffic planning is largely done on the basis of mild objectophilia.
And I'm not going to kink shame anyone over it but it makes for terrible traffic planning.
It’s not screwed up to have an emotional attachment to an object. Go into your kitchen and honestly list the feelings you get when you use the pan or knife you always do, or the lamp in the living room that you read by, or your bed.
The definitive difference being my bed or my knife doesn't burn fuel and I don't expect an enormous amount of space in the public room so I can put my bed wherever I like.
Germany has a fucked up post war infrastructure built around cars. Ppl rely on them to get around.
To an extent, yes. Not even close to the extent these people tell themselves this to be true. There is entirely too many statistics about the average car trip in a city being like 3 kilometers. A majority of germans live within 10km of their work and 5k of a supermarket. They still drive their car everywhere.
I grew up in the german countryside. The people there take their car for literally anything. Forgot the milk? Hop in the car to drive to the supermarket 800m away. Wanna get fresh rolls on a weekend? Hop in the car to drive to the bakery 500m away. Visiting a friend who lives a kilometer away? Guess what, car!
And this wasn't an infrastructure problem. Those distances are not a problem for anyone who doesn't have mobility issues and the infrastructure is fine. You can ride on the eternally empty sidewalks everywhere, legally.
It is an infrastructure problem, yes. It is not purely an infrastructure problem anymore. There's pragmatists in the thread that say they don't give a shit about their car other than as a means of transportation. That is an infrastructure problem.
People claiming they will never set foot in public transport again, no matter how much it'll cost them, is not an infrastructure problem.
In incredibly stereotypical German style, you are technically correct, ppl who say they won’t ever use transit again aren’t an infrastructure problem, they are a symptom of an infrastructure problem.
And in an incredibly stereotypical american style, you're talking about societal issues half a planet away with the confidence of a person who's an activist there.
Stop using ppl as a stand in for the institution. They are responding to what the institution hath wrought, you are mad at the outcome.
I'm not. Not even in that post. I made it perfectly clear there is a sizeable amount of car pragmatist who'd get in a bus if there was a bus.
This does not change the fact that there is also a sizeable amount of people who will not get into a bus if their livelihood dependent on it, because through decades of car culture we have cultivated a subset of the population which isn't about material differences, they have romanticized the car to the point where any change to the status quo is wrong to them, no matter how much better it may be. Change the material conditions and they'd just fucking hate it, because it's a topic that's driven almost entirely on an emotional level. They're basically car chuds, if we wanna do a hexbear appropiate analogy.
The bus thing seems like it’s about class not transit. They’re not saying “ugh, busses” they’re saying “ugh poor ppl”. I could see someone just not being willing to tolerate the lack of control too.
Spot on
You’re talking about people who built a part of their identity around the availability of a thing and that seemed simple to me at first and now it’s looking more complex but still a product of the institutional failings not the people’s fundamental nature or something.
It's not like I don't get how this happened on some level. Could write you a book about it, but the one hyperfixation literally every one of these comments has is that they don't even perceive the negative externalities and the fact that all their often touted freedom is the result of probably by now trillions of euros having been spent and being continued to spend on the infrastructure required to facilitate all this freedom.
These aren't unknown factors, especially not on r/de. There's always some sort of post there about how much car cost, there isn't a chance in hell these people aren't aware of it, they just don't give a fuck about it. Which is where the problems come in, you can like your car, or cars or the act of driving or whatever and I'd have no problem with you, but if you're vehemently opposed to any further regulation for the common good, you arrive at a position where you expect pretty much everybody who isn't as selfish as you to nearly completely subsidize your hobby for you and this makes you a problem.
No one is this much a product of their society, people do have agency. You can't give little kids asthma because you couldn't be bothered to cycle 500m to the bakery and back and then blame this on being a product of your time.
German car culture is not as often discussed as American car culture, perhaps bc the cities didn't suffer as much from it and the built environment wasn't literally completely rebuilt to make the country dependent on autos but it's definitely a thing and it can be pretty intense.
We absolutely built the entire country to be dependent on the car. Fuck, we haven't really stopped doing this either.
There is no goal I cannot achieve with my car […] I am in my own world
Neoliberalism is Balkanization for every individual
I fucking hated driving so much back when I was able to. Driving on roads with traffic suck. And your average car is poorly engineered and sucks tbh. But sports cars and race cars are really cool. I've always wanted to drive one around a racetrack. It makes sense for Germans to be so car obsessed. There's the autobahn, which is probably super dangerous due to all the assholes in sports cars absolutely slamming them in the no speed limit sections, but a road with no speed limit is great car propaganda. And Germany has arguably the best racetrack in the world, the nurburgring. No wonder people love cars so much in that country.
here’s the autobahn, which is probably super dangerous due to all the assholes in sports cars absolutely slamming them in the no speed limit sections
I mean you could do better, but at least statistically it's not.
The problem with the unlimited Autobahn is pretty much the CO2 thing. Like 0,3% of the entire CO2 Emissions in germany are from people driving their cars over ~130kph on the Autobahn. Well that and traffic flows like shit when you have people going all sorts of different speeds.
The chuds obviously do not understand the latter one and for the first one they claim 0,3% is an insignifcant figure because car brain, but like 0,3% of an entire countrys greenhouse gasses coming from a group of people that small for no discernible benefit other than theoretical cases is fucking insane.
0.3% of a countries emissions come from a small group of people flooring their sports cars on the autobahn just because they can? Wow
Pretty much, yeah. And they'll defend this right to no end. I've had people tell me a general speed limit on the Autobahn is unconstitutional, as it violates their right of property.
Because, you see, when they bought the car they did so under the expectation to be able to drive it really fast on Autobahn. If that's not possible anymore, the car loses all value to them and also is worth less on the used market and they were going to sue any government for damages that set a general speed limit.
That was the oddest one. The other arguments are usually We need to start elsewhere / it's a freedom worth the emissions / the entire car industry will literally instantly die
Literally every other country has sports cars that are still very valuable lol, this is some :ancap-good: shit
The OP of the thread I translated from called the arguments against taking away the privileges of the car "being pretty much solipsistic" and I think that's a good way to put it, actually.
