Future generations knowing that factual history will look back on the people of the combustion engines era as ridiculous, willfully self-poisoning rubes, driving around in noisy, stinky, slow, expensive to own operate and maintain turds.
(disclaimer: driver of EV for many years, so i think of that because tires still wear out)
Honestly, I don't. I'm glad I'm alive now and not then, but it isn't too difficult to acknowledge that industrial pollution in urban areas (which absolutely did kill people both passively and during smogs) was a necessary evil for the era and helped us get to where we are today.
I'm sure people will say the same thing about internal combustion engines in 50 years' time.
Similarly today, I don't see a lot of combustion engine use as necessary. Average car trip is only a few miles and could easily be made by bike. If we had designed cities for people, with good transit and cycling/walking infrastructure, we would have far less pollution in our urban environment. But instead we made policies that maximised car and gas sales rather than maximise health and wellness, again to enrich the few at the expense of the many.
Industrialisation the 1800s and early 1900s saw the end of child labour and slavery, the rise of the 8 hour work day and an increase in life expectancy by an entire decade.
Life then was terrible compared to the post-war era, but was constantly exponentially improving in material terms.
>But instead we made policies that maximised car and gas sales rather than maximise health and wellness, again to enrich the few at the expense of the many.
Poor city design and the existence of the internal combustion engine are two separate problems. Even with perfectly designed cities, we still reap huge benefits from the technology in terms of trucking, shipping and mechanised agriculture (!!!).
[1] https://www.oecd.org/environment/non-exhaust-particulate-emi...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
Then there's still the direct mortality from collisions with pedestrians and cyclists, and things like obesity from encouraging a sedentary lifestyle. I think future generations will look at car-dependency in general as ridiculous, whether ICE or electric.
I hope future generations will be capable of nuances.
[1]My personal favorites: turbocharged inline-6s ( BMW B58, Toyota 2JZ & 1JZ) and naturally aspirated V8s (GM aluminum small block family).
[2]currently ~25h36m for an Audi S6 vs 42h17m for a Tesla Model S
[3]currently 6m52s for a Lamborghini Huracan Performante vs 7m35s for a Tesla Model S Plaid
[4]A Volkswagen EV holds the Pike's Peak Hill Climb record, and it is unlikely to lose it to an ICE vehicle due to the power loss caused by the thinner air at altitude.
Show me an ICE-powered car that does the same without exhibiting a petro-mechanical temper tantrum nobody sane wants to be near without wearing at least ear protection. Maybe the Bugatti Veyron? Even that mountain of money makes quite a ruckus judging from videos online.
Basically any ICE vehicle that doesn't piss off your neighbors is slow. Even my stock 04 R1 which didn't have much weight to move would wake up the neighborhood idling, but it did manage sub-3s 0-60 times while disintegrating clutch discs.
The mechanical cacophony is part of the fun. A good sound is almost as important as the power and speed. That's why many gearheads don't sing the praises of supercharged FA20 engines: they sound like shit. Motorcycles like the R1 with 11,000 RPM redlines are a glorious aural orgasm.
I live close to a major thoroughfare with a tunnel, popular with all manner of racers late at night. I love hearing the drift cars scream by. The only thing that is annoying is the bosozoku with their low-speed engine revving: https://youtu.be/R6cSso-9iJU
Maybe they'll look at similarly as we look at the people of the time of the Neolithic Revolution (and perhaps a long time afterwards), with their lifespans decreased due to poorer diets and zoonotic diseases from domesticated animals.
The general idea is that similar virus strains exist across species, but only a fraction identically spread across species. So a human may be exposed to a similar but noninfectious virus from (for example) a dog or a cat, and will gain an immunological advantage compared to someone living apart from other species, because the human immune system will remember the foreign protein sequences to which it can react when exposed again.
why is that said to be so?
Uh...because that's what the archeological findings are? For example, from https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... :
"Cities and other large settlements appeared for the first time during the Neolithic. Pathogens require a large host to thrive and these large, crowded populations provided a human host population that had not previously existed among hunter-gather societies (Armelagos et al. 1991:15). Now able to spread easily from person to person in the crowded conditions of cities, pathogens were able to exploit entire groups and reach endemic levels (Armelagos et al. 1991; Papathanasiou 2005).
"Crowded conditions paired with human settlements in close proximity to animals also contributed to high rates of infectious disease. In many early agricultural communities, animals were kept both near to and inside of houses. This proximity allowed some zoonotic diseases to transfer from animals to humans (Armelagos et al. 1991; Eshed et al. 2010). Contaminated water sources and close contact with human waste also facilitated parasitic infection in both animals and humans (Armelagos et al. 1991; Larsen 2006; Papathanasiou 2005)."
"The increase of infectious disease associated with the adoption of an agricultural lifestyle did not necessarily increase mortality (Eshed et al. 2010). Those most likely to suffer fatal infections would have been infants, young children, and the elderly. Individuals who reached reproductive age had likely developed a resistance to such diseases (Armelagos et al. 1991). However, it must be noted that nutritional deficiencies can reduce resistance to infections which can further contribute to nutritional deficiencies (Armelagos et al. 1991; Larsen 2006). This interplay between nutrition and disease can increase mortality in populations and inhibit an individual's ability to work and/or reproduce (Goodman 1993)."
Basically until we learned about the implications of sedentary urban lifestyle with agriculture, and until we learned how to do something about it, we'd been unknowingly suffering from major quality of life issues.
Even if you continued producing the electricity to charge EVs with fossil fuels, you'd be improving the human habitats by moving the emissions further away from the people while simultaneously using larger-scale optimized generators without vehicular constraints like compactness, weight, and wildly varying speeds/loads getting in the way of keeping the emissions clean.