SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
martyb
on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:34AM
from the now-they're-buying...trucks? dept.
from the now-they're-buying...trucks? dept.
General Motors has announced it's shuttering five production facilities and killing six vehicle platforms by the end of 2019 as it reallocates resources towards self-driving technologies and electric vehicles.
[...] North American car production hit 17.5 million vehicles in 2016, and dropped marginally to 17.2 million in 2017. Interesting, but perhaps not significant.
More telling are changes in driver behaviour. In North America, for example, fewer teens are getting driver's licences. In 1983, 92 per cent of teens were licensed, while by 2014, that number had dropped to 77 per cent. In Germany, the number of new licences issued to drivers aged 17 to 25 has dropped by 300,000 over the last 10 years.
Are we over our love affair with cars?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @08:27PM
Most people prefer to ship a car to the junk yard than get it retitled, and anyone who has bought alien sale, lost title, etc car may have some bad stories to tell.
Making it easier to clear/reissue titles would go far towards keeping existing cars available and in the system, and make it better for people who need a car, whether as a first driver, a project car, or something to retrofit/restore.
Really the majority of those old junkers would be excellent conversions for low density commuter electric systems. All you really need is a single bundle of wiring through the firewall back to the trunk/gas tank location, and then a shielded battery pack (lion, or maybe nimh, latter has been quite tolerant of abuse for me, including the temperatures inside of a Pentium 4 laptop which would have no doubt have triggered a LION battery into runaway combustion.)
Even if not every car is as safe as a modern one, many of the older cars are far more maintainable until and unless they are in an accident, and even then for minor accidents they are both cheaper and safer/more reliable to repair. Many modern cars if damaged may transmit the damage throughout the frame, leading them to be junk on the first accident with no chance of recovery. For many older cars that would only happen in a rollover event, or 50+ mph accident, both of which are relatively uncommon in the grand scheme of car accidents.