thirdcrank wrote:I think it's futile to look for any logic in car ownership and use, now or in the future. It's irrational and I'll put my hand up here.
There is some logic: some journeys become near-impossible, while others become more expensive in some ways (time and money using other modes of transport or hiring a car), and yet others may become cheaper (like my bike ride to town). How you value those journeys not made and the additional expenses (which vary immensely depending on what car hire/share, public transport and cycling facilities you have locally) have big parts to play in whether you think car use is logical for any particular journey.
Logical car ownership becomes a question of totalling up an estimate of those additional costs and deciding if they're less than the £x000/year a car costs in depreciation, servicing, insurance and other mostly-fixed costs (and yes, I know lower use means lower costs in some ways, but the penalties for underestimating when buying insurance tend to be fairly painful so don't be overoptimistic).
Then there's the question of which car to buy. When we changed car a few years ago, I worked out some numbers for electric cars (the Leaf of the time, I think) and couldn't quite make them add up, especially as we didn't have a guaranteed parking place then, it didn't look like you could easily remove the batteries to charge them indoors and charging points were still very few in that area. The cars have moved on, we now have a parking place and charging points seem much more common. I suspect the numbers might work out next time and the extra cost in time and money of 30 minute fast-recharge stops doesn't seem a huge barrier now that some cars can go longer than 2ish hours I usually drive between breaks.
So you can be logical about this. I doubt many are yet. They just buy the popular type because of widespread marketing that it's the best and if you do that and it goes wrong (as forecasts always can), people tend not to point out the mistake, possibly because they followed the herd too, but if you make a logical decision to try an innovative solution, there will be far more willing critics