Europe is not the US, we have somewhat functional public transport in most parts of the continent, you are not _that_ dependent on a car. Also, EVs will become cheaper than ICEs, with or without subsidies or tax incentives, it's only a matter of time. Battery prices on a cell level approach €40/kWh. A new drive-train incl. battery will be < 2000€.
Also, given that polluted air affects poor people the most, getting rid of all that exhaust of old worn out cars with ICEs will be a good thing in any case.
>Europe is not the US, we have somewhat functional public transport in most parts of the continent, you are not _that_ dependent on a car.
That's a case by case basis and not valid blanket-wide over everyone in every city on the whole continent. Outside of HN bubble, not everyone lives in big cities with high speed rail, underground subways or working remotely in small villages with amazing bicycle paths
A lot of tier 2 cities are heavily underdeveloped in that regard and need a car for commute to work outsider or inside the city, unless you wanna spend 1-2+ hours/day, each way, on public transit switching and waiting on buses since such cities sprawled out and grew in size a lot, but public transit infra is still stuck in the 90s with slow busses and no trains. Car ownership is still the only way you can have some free time between work, sleep and commute.
This is all fine and well, but eventually once the peasants have taken enough fuckings on enough axis over enough people's pet issues they will realize the trend and you and all your buddies who think it's ok to just fuck people will lose your heads or get to share a hole or whatever. Maybe it'll be offset by productivity gains and take a few generations to get there but fucking the peasantry because the rulers know better, or whatever the argument is, isn't a sustainable way to run societies.
As the middle class shrinks it becomes clearer that these sort of heavy handed policies are almost exclusively peddled by what marx would call the bourgeois. You don't see the "my car is a significant expense" or "home ownership isn't a given" class people going off advocating for policy like this on minor issues.
Most people where I live, even the poorest, can afford to own a car and almost all of them do. It’s regulations that are making car ownership impossible for those people. It’s the government that is a bourgeois enemy of the people.
