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I spent the first 10 years of my working life without a car. Then bought one just to see what was going to happen. Here are some niceties of car ownership:

- No need to plan around transportation times.

- Staying at the party after the last subway: the crowd changes a lot.

- Intimate conversation with friends/partner, while listening to music of your choice.

- Dressing up without worrying about others staring. It applies to your passengers too! You will see your friends really thankful for your ride, wearing suits/dresses/high heels!

- Hability to change destination on the go.

- Having a strong excuse not to drink, then partying till 6am, waking up without a hangover and going straight to the gym.

- Going to wherever after work on a Friday night.

I never regretted it.

The crowd at a party changes a lot after the last metro because everyone left it is the sort of person to take the first metro in the morning, not because they have cars.

And some people arrive with the last metro :)

The dressing up is an interesting one. I always felt uncomfortable wearing formalwear on the subway in rougher areas at night. No one bothered me though ( because of clothes, I got the usual aggressive riders other times).

It affects one gender a lot more than the other.

Not here really. I go to pretty kinky parties and I often find myself on the metro with other partygoers. One time pretty recently there was fellow partygoer (unknown to me but clearly from the same party) who even had her boobs out in the metro (at 4am) and no comments or even weird looks were made. It made me happy seeing the tolerance and diversity (and, admittedly, the boobs too ;) ). Nobody was being weird or trying to sneak a photo or anything.

Though strangely enough a friend of mine was told off by security for taking off her heels while sitting down (they hurt a bit) but at the same time ignoring the boobs girl altogether lol.

European capital? Curious about such party scene ^^

Yes, Barcelona (not a capital though it is the capital of the state of Catalonia).

Berlin is even (way) crazier by the way. Though I'm not sure how they would deal with this in public there, Germans can be a bit more formal in that sense :)

Germans are more accepting of nudity than most other countries, there are very few laws against it. Partly it's a legacy of the FKK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freik%C3%B6rperkultur).

Ah ok, but there are a lot of Calvinists that I'm sure would object in public.

Interesting, I didn't know about that movement.

Danger of broken glass on the ground? Would hurt bare feet, irrelevant to bare boobs.

True but she was sitting down on a subway bench and just resting her feet. She was not trying nor planning to walk barefoot.

Interesting - I guess this phenomena is country dependent? Where I live I prefer to take public transport when I go out in formal clothes.

Depends on the diversity level of the city.

Can you expand on what you mean here?

No

Why not take a taxi?

Because they're so much more expensive, use sketchy pricing systems, often are driven by sketchy drivers and so forth.

Most of those are also perks of having a bicycle :)

Just gotta get custom made SPD dress shoes :)

Terms and conditions apply.

I'm currently running an errand and I took an Uber here because it's absolutely pouring at the moment and I don't need this sort of excitement in my life.

> Intimate conversation with friends/partner, while listening to music of your choice.

My friend used to drive a car that we dubbed "the car of truth". Many honest conversations have been had in there.

> - No need to plan around transportation times.

Except for the rush hour. When I did ~25km commute one way I had to think when I should leave with the car. With bicycle, time was constant, so I was free to choose when I could leave.

> - Staying at the party after the last subway: the crowd changes a lot. > - Having a strong excuse not to drink

Car is good excuse not to drink - I have used that excuse myself. But there are other ways - you do not need car for this. It does not work both ways: if you want to drink, with car you can not.

My point is: car is convenience not freedom.

Convenience and freedom seem interchangeable here.

Car is freedom to stay late. Public transit is freedom to drink.

> No need to plan around transportation times.

These two really depend on the system and frequency; non-issue for high-frequency underground systems, say. There'll be another one along in 3 minutes.

> Staying at the party after the last subway: the crowd changes a lot.

This depends a lot on the system as well. In Dublin, traditionally, we only had night buses on weekends, they were infrequent, and they used weird Frankenstein routes (they'd take like five normal routes, and make a route that passed _all the stops of all five_) so they took hours. In the last few years, a bunch of normal routes have started going 24 hours; makes things a lot easier. I was recently out inconveniently far from home, at 4 in the morning, resigning myself to an hour walk home, or else trying to somehow get a taxi, when I noticed that there was a bus coming in ten minutes at the stop outside the bar, which would bring me to five minutes walk from home.

You can still take public transit when you own a car. I do it all the time.

Take the old beat up Toyota pill!

> Huge cost and high depreciation

Fair cost and zero depreciation

> Maintenance costs and time sink

Oil change once a year.

> Tyre swap in winter

Fair point, local laws and climate realities may require this.

> insurance and worry about losing no claim bonus

Low insurance; no worry if you get a few more scratches on top of existing scratches.

> Road tax and chance of fines if you miss a speed sign

There are apps for that

> Finding parking and paying for that

There are apps for that

> Worry about break-in, damage and theft

Comes pre-damaged.

> Not being able to do anything productive while driving (on the train I can do so just fine)

Sure, but not much you can do on the train either, standing squeezed like a sardine in a can, with network connectivity only above ground or at stations.

> Always having to return to where you parked it (a much overlooked convenience of public transport)

I think there have been only 2 times in the past few years when I felt this was an inconvenience.

>>Road tax and chance of fines if >>you miss a speed sign

>There are apps for that

>> Finding parking and paying for that

>There are apps for that

Ahh the "you're holding it wrong" everyone with a ticket or parking fees is a sucker!

>> Not being able to do anything productive while driving (on the train I can do so just fine)

>Sure, but not much you can do on the train either, standing squeezed like a sardine in a can, with network connectivity only above ground or at stations.

I don't even have words, so everyone else that can't manage to avoid local laws deftly is a sucker who didn't use the right app but you can't find offline video, ebooks , wikipédia , etc...at some point you just gotta be content you're making a choice for your preference so let people have theirs. I definitely drove your beat up Toyota/Saturn/Honda/Mazda for 16 years and you couldn't pay me enough to go back to that lifestyle willingly.

> everyone else that can't manage to avoid local laws deftly is a sucker who didn't use the right app but you can't find offline video, ebooks , wikipédia , etc

I mean, to each their own, but I can't remember the last time I got a speeding fine, and I listen to ebooks in the car every trip.

I always thought it would be cool to have a comma ai like device to use computer vision to automatically detect and report roadside police

I dunno, I had an old beat up Honda (great car) and it was still a pain. Definitely more maintenance than an oil change once a year (tyres, brakes, bulbs, etc. etc.)

> Take the old beat up Toyota pill!

Well yes that's what I do if I have the choice. My most expensive car ever cost me 2200 euro (which was a pretty nice full-option 10-year-old Volvo - big cars are super unpopular here because of the high road tax).

But the problem with those these days is that you're banned from city centers then.

But still I feel much freeer not having the worry and cost of it. And I like walking a lot and I hate making any plans so I often go off on a trip to whatever and take the train back from wherever I end up. But yes YMMV!

> Comes pre-damaged.

I like this one. But for the apps... they are plaster, not solution.

> Sure, but not much you can do on the train either, standing squeezed like a sardine in a can, with network connectivity only above ground or at stations.

A surprising number of underground systems have phone signal these days. I was recently surprised, visiting London, to notice that my phone was mostly working on the tube; the tube is, of course, the oldest and clunkiest of all underground systems, so if they can do it...

An EV would work great for me, though:

-no public transport inside of an hour's walk

-sky-high petrol/diesel prices, but I can charge from solar

-cheap road tax for EVs

-I leave the farm once every 1-2 weeks and generally only go about 15km away on those journeys, so trickle-charging and moderate range would not be an impediment to my mobility

Unfortunately a farming income does not translate to a new Tesla, or even a used Kia EV. Guess I should have got one before I burned out and quit tech.

I'd add to that, at least for my farm, having a convenient source of electricity sitting in the field for when things break (to power tools, etc.) would be fantastic.

But you are spot on. The dollars and cents just don't make sense.

The true object of my lust is one of these electric tractors, which can also serve as a mobile power bank, but I might have to resort to converting something instead: https://solectrac.com/

Yeah YMMV of course. I live in an old city center so it's a totally different story than living on a farm. No solar power here either (I share a tiny roof with around 15 other apartments).

I shopped for an EV but nobody was selling them at the time and I ended up moving to Oregon so having a truck was a pretty smart buy. I've used it countless times at this point while fixing up and building on my property.

I do eventually plan to get some dinky EV at some point for scooting around town. The way I solved the problem you mentioned about charge locations is to install a 240V.

imo, electric vehicles are still a luxury even at lower price points unless you live a very specific lifestyle.

It depends where you live. In Australia outside of the capitals, public transport is nonexistent or terrible.

If you're situated more than 5km from the nearest town, car ownership is practically mandatory.

> Always having to return to where you parked it (a much overlooked convenience of public transport)

Oh yes, when you are used to that freedom, always having to return to the car feels like a ball and chain. People who are not used to it clearly don't feel that way at all. An impressive example of how perspective changes perception.

For a person who doesn't use or need a car, it seems none of this applies to you.

No it doesn't but I stopped owning a car for those reasons. I used to live somewhere where I did need one and I absolutely hated driving and all those issues around car ownership.

> I can't park at home. So I'd have to go somewhere just for charging and hang around while it's doing it.

If you have no parking at home, you can't have a car. Bringing EV into your situation is irrelevant.

In the USA, it is allowed and even common for people without at home parking to own cars and park them on the street.

In China, it technically isn’t allowed (like Japan you have to have proof of parking spot before you can buy a car), but the rule is easily gamed and lots of people park on the street (or in many cases, the right lane of a two lane one way road without street parking, they only get ticketed once a year so it’s ok - see “wild parking”). It’s a bit crazy, maybe other cities aren’t as bad as Beijing.

I _really_ love the Japanese model of having to prove you can park your car out of the way combined with the enforced Kei car model. It lets them keep cities compact and mostly walkable.

People do live in apartment complexes with parking. It's just that you don't have a reserved spot and they probably don't have EV charging.

My "apartment complex" doesn't have any parking, the building is from the late 1800s :)

There's public car parks around but they are prohibitively expensive as it's an old city center.

I didn't say all complexes have them. I said plenty exist. They're usually not in the building but outside.

Well I could of course park elsewhere. Like seanmcdirmid said, I could park on the street though in this area (and residents qualify for permits. But it's a nightmare to find a spot. And one with charging is simply impossible.

I could also rent a spot somewhere. But this becomes a special issue with EVs, because I regularly would have to go and drive it somewhere to charge it. Also those rented spaces are crazy expensive.

I don't have parking, but I could get a permit to park on the road I live on for, I think, about 100 eur a year (if you don't live there it's 4eur/hour). In less central areas, on-street parking is often completely uncontrolled. This is a pretty common setup in many places.

Do you have children by any chance?

An electric moped/bicycle might work for you?