Opinion: Neither electric nor autonomous vehicles are the transportation silver bullet
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has laid out four main ways to decarbonize the transportation industry, which accounts for 29% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions that are plunging our planet into a bleak (and scorching) future. However, their suggestion to switch en masse to electric vehicles (EVs) has received the majority of the national attention in the past decade, including in the Biden administration’s EV rebates. While electric cars aren’t much better than internal combustion engine cars, autonomous vehicles (AVs) have a hazy future and only perpetuate societal car-centrism. Many people envision them as the next logical development of vehicles, since they may prove safer than human drivers in many cases and would also enable would-be drivers to be productive during travel rather than focusing all of their energy on driving.