[vk5tu]

It feels pretty much the same, except there's no second car.

The first problem is that housing stock takes a lot of modification to get to modern energy usage (essentially, 0 joules after construction). We haven't started down that road in any serious way as a society, even though the technology is commercial and past early-adopter pricing. But living in that house, it's no different to living in any other nice house -- a McMansion has a big reception hall, my passive solar house has a airlock/mudroom -- that's not a difference in lifestyle, just in detail.

The second problem is transport. At a personal level this might mean EVs, except that they are so very expensive. You might afford to replace one of the family's cars, but not all of them. Public transport would appear to be an alternative, but if you don't have access to that already, then the build time for that is over a decade. So there's going to be an uncomfortable interim of, say, twenty years. Which I suspect will be filled with bikes and e-bikes, as adding bike lanes and bikeways are minor projects. There are times when your description of personal transport as "scaled up" is very true.

There are many small annoyances from being slightly ahead of the bulk of the population. But one of the things Covid-19 has done has been to make local government is far more open to change: they've flipped from sending me letters about my vegetable garden in my front yard, to asking me if I'd be happy for their staff to tour it and collect ideas.