[bubbasugga]

Their cynicism is cope. They are witnessing their own decline every single day. It's honestly so sad. On the other side of the globe there is Tesla [1]. Even if you don't like the idea of cars, this is the pinnacle of a utilitarian product. Also one of the most popular vehicles (globally) as opposed to the (incorrect) example used in the thread.

Modern cars are great for the most parts. More comfortable, more safe, more autonomous, bigger, better and faster. Of course not all cars are created equal.

Cars are a resilient mode of transport. Even if road maintenance stops for 30 years due to some kind of crisis, a society with cars will be way more functional than one that was solely reliant on a centralized transportation system. And this is not an unrealistic scenario, people are just used to the last 80 years of peace due to rapid economic growth and globalization.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1ve_ttBEPw

[tavavex]

Electric cars could have paved the way to practical, utilitarian vehicles through their less-moving-parts, simpler nature. Instead, what we got were IoT gadgets on wheels, and Tesla is a pinnacle of that. It's about as far from a utilitarian product as you can get. Every modern Tesla vehicle is a definition of software-over-hardware and form-over-function. In your hypothetical 30 year apocalypse scenario, no one would be driving a Tesla, because their "utilitarian" Steam Early Access-like self-driving would cease once people can no longer pay the subscription fee for it, their single-point-of-failure screens break with no way to replace them (after all, the utilitarian designers were most concerned with making it look cool rather than lasting a long time), and because the overcomplicated door handles would stop working, as again, it was worth it for how cool they looked. In addition to 1000 other issues, like if they happened to get stuck on a bad software revision that breaks some random feature. "Most fast and break things" for cars, now that's utilitarianism. Tesla's physical build quality is widely known as being some of the worst in the market of luxury new cars. Nothing about them is conducive to longevity. In your apocalypse where there is no road maintenance and no spare parts, we'd be driving either the barebones self-propelled transport (bikes and such), or the absolute simplest cars you can fix yourself, such as... the subject of this thread, for instance. Or really, many similar cars from that era which that thing represents. Modern cars have gotten better in many regards - efficiency or safety-oriented design, for example - but in others, they've gotten so, so much worse. Longevity and repairability is down, what's in is hammering subscription-based, DRMed, badly designed things-as-a-service into every industry, including the automotive industry. That's what people are cynical about.

> They are witnessing their own decline every single day. It's honestly so sad.

What is so sad is being so stuck-up in whatever opinions you have as to think that people cannot genuinely in good faith have opinions other than yours, that everyone must surely know this objective truth you believe and that it's everyone else who's insanely deluding themselves from confronting this reality that you in your wisdom bring to them.

[bubbasugga]

get back into your hole