I've been thinking, the Comecon didn't really produce enough cars to develop much of a car culture yet I'm wondering if that is a bad thing. Simply put getting everyone to drive is a logistical nightmare then is US car culture where it is a mess where everything is built to force Americans behind the wheel.
Of course this is a planning problem that capitalism has shown incapable of even addressing, though it seems a issue where the material limitations bumps against the demands of the motorist. Even if the Comecon could have spat out cars as fast as Japanese auto manufactures there were limits to Eastern Europe's road network and that raises a question if expanding that road network would have been worth while. Still making more desirable vehicles is something one would want for all production, thus best I can think off is just hopping better mass transit and city planning would limit demand for cars.
Car culture
Burger car culture wastes time that could be better solved with public transportation and fetishes cars as a status symbol to buy as soon as you finish paying off the last one. The alienation of sitting in a solitary vehicle surrounded by others doing the same to and from working or buying shit is truly capitalism distilled into a pure form.
As much as I love cars and driving, I think even now technology is making the driver itself obsolete. There will be no reason to own a private vehicle under socialism, except under very limited circumstances
Car culture sucks dick, but wasn't the USSR's main impediment to such a thing approaching even Western Europe's level, the fact that a rigid internal passport system viciously restricted travel, to the extent even visiting a neighboring city was often impossible?
Self-driving cars don't solve the infrastructure problem since the issue is not the skill of drivers yet the low throughputs of roads. So really getting rid of the driver basically solves nothing. Renting cars might help the issue somewhat especially if instead of sitting in a parking lot they can be used by someone else though the entire car concept just doesn't scale well.
The issue will solve itself as a result of innovation, which is incentived by capitalism. Self driving electric cars will allow ride sharing and will be a fraction of the cost of car ownership. Not many people will own cars by 2030. I doubt my 4 year old niece will ever drive car. Cars will be by then, an extension of your home or a public space.
The only innovations "incentivized" by capitalism have so far been to get around traditional taxi regulations to exploit drivers harder.
Self-driving cars have a scale problem. A section of road can't even take the tonnage of 19 century railways, tracks simply allow for more mass to be moved faster due to the track bed distributing the weight effectually and the rails guiding the train. Add electrification and now you have trains that don't have to lug around their power source as you can have massive stationary power plants power trains along with everything else giving them excellent power to weight.
Already there are trains that run at speeds over 400 km/h at a fraction of the operating cost of the race cars one would need to match them on the road and there are even faster trains in the development.
Like & said, self-driving cars, like cars in general, are a meme. The real solution is what we should've kept with all along, mass transit (trains/busses/trolleys/etc) and mass distribution(milkmen/delivery/pneumatic tubes/etc).
If you REAAAALLY want to push new tech as a solution, telecommuting is the really obvious solution for a giant fraction of the economy:
globalworkplaceanalytics.com
True, but I'm thinking more of rail, more than anything. Once most cars are self-driving, the logical conclusion is to just have rail transport and small electric vehicles for inside urban areas. I think as drivers are driven out of the car itself, it's only natural that infrastructure will be re-shaped to fit this paradigm. Cars don't really make sense except under capitalism. I sure do hope that hobbyists can keep building cars for private use like racing and so on. I would hate to see the sport die out. Then again, I'm also a bullfighting fanatic and that's going to die out within the next 20 years for sure.
I agree that self driving cars are a meme, I imagine a city computer controlling all traffic at once
So it's not a self driving car but network of cars.
Come on.
Do you have a fetish for centralization or something?
Doesn't need to be centralized at a national level if that's what concerns you.
Self driving cars are just a Silicon Valley snow job that will go down in history as bullshit right next to pets.com
We've had self driving cars since the 1960s, they were guided by magnets via a steel rail built into the road, proximity sensors kept the cars a part. But porky can't own that without the state so were have to endure AI testing with an entire city of pedestrians being lab rats.
Well American car culture in particular is cancer with a big chunk of motorists having little to no respect for the machines they drive. In the US cars are just how you get around on top of being a display of consumption. In the US you simply buy a car that can theoretically go fast or off-road while most would never use them for that, as they are more attached to the idea then actually investing time in learning how to drive outside the commute.
I live in the US, and we have plenty of good car enthusiasts. I don't know why people think the US is somehow different than the rest of the capitalist world.
Yeah I don't know much about Soviet cars. I hear they had good heating systems (obviously) so they were warm and toasty, and were built like tanks. But otherwise they didn't have much to recommend them. I'd go with the Yugo.
I'm in Texas where car culture is perhaps more pervasive than perhaps anywhere in the world outside of Saudi Arabia. One thing you'll immediately notice if you go out in the suburbs are white dudes in their 30s and 40s driving these pickup trucks, which they rarely use to actually haul anything. If you go out in cattle country you'll see pickup trucks hauling stuff and they are noticeably less flashy, and a lot of those ranchers laugh at these suburban wannabe cowboys.
Anyways you're spending around $27k-30k minimum on one of these bought new, which is a year's wages for most people. But then you add on the costs of fuel and maintenance and it's quite a lot. I'd remind everyone these big pickups are a recent invention (the 1990s really) and if you were driving a truck in the 70s and 80s you were probably using it for work. Kind of an obvious point about capitalism creating new wants and desires – and fueled by credit. Don't let the flashy pickup trucks fool you; most of the drivers are in debt.
Fuck off. I want to travel in peace.
Good solution to cars: high speed rail connecting cities and allowing quick commutes
Better solution to cars: localize/municipalize work as much as possible to reduce commutes so that people travel to a different city as rarely as possible except for leisure.
You are literally interacting with people more when you drive a car because you are in control of the vehicle's behavior in an environment full of other self-determining drivers in vehicles. If you're on a bus or train you can just sit there.
It's generally considered rude to just start blabbing to people on the bus anyway. Still, I'm biased because I love cars. There's just something about those machines that speaks to me.
US car culture is kind of unique for example Japanese car culture thinks American cars are all overweight land barges that are hard to control in tight corners and they are not really wrong in that generalization. Also Japan still has mass transit where it is viewed as nonsensical to even attempt move the bulk of rail passengers to highways (mostly because Japan doesn't the land to even try to have a US style highway system).
The Comecon was better at trucks then cars, thus you'd be better with something like the UAZ-452 (van), IFA W50 (off road, all-wheel drive light truck) or Ural-4320 (6x6 build for the army).
Yeah, because for a long time American culture was a culture of horsepower. As time went on, though, American cars have changed quite a bit. Look at the C7 Corvette, for example. It not only has power, but it also has great handling characteristics. It just so happens that muscle cars defined the US for a long time, but people are increasingly starting to care about cornering speed. Not to mention the import scene that's existed since the 90s. Hell, Low Rider culture is Also an American thing (albeit Mexican-American). You have to understand that car culture in almost every country has its little subsets. Same thing with guns in the US, actually. There's a Colion Noir video that makes fun of this pretty explicitly.
uaz, lada niva. there you go those are quallity off-roaders. Soviets produced the best top tier off road stuff.
There's one absolutely massive quirk of Japanese car culture that practically nobody in Japan or elsewhere pays much attention to: Used cars and parts are de-facto illegal due to a blatantly anti-consumer "inspection" regime:
en.wikipedia.org
Takumi pirate GANG
Trains are truly the masterrace of transportation.
not for off-grid living and truly practicing communism in the modern era tho.
I don't know about you but trying to not get hit by pickups going 90 in a 60 and people who don't understand zipper merging isn't very peaceful. I'd rather sit on a bus with my earbuds in and zone out for half an hour.
You can't have space communism without a power grid. O'Neil Cylinders without electricity will quickly turn into tombs for their residents as your life support will have to be produced by the O'Neil Cylinder itself, and it would be far more power efficient to have solar panels on the outside of the hull rather the inside.
This would not be a thing under socialism.
WTF!? Where's my Khmer Rouge flag.
Space communism is the only way, socialism on one planet is revision.
come on now
It doesn't have to be urban blocks, but the idea is that you will be socialized yourself. You will be part of society in one way or another.
I like revolvers more than automatics but I recognize that they're objectively inferior at their purpose.
No, I know that. Just like black powder firearms. In the future, I hope we still have cars, if only for recreation on a track and so on.
There will likely always be practical uses for cars or car-like vehicles. Some people would probably prefer them for transportation, but I can't imagine more than a small minority would rather drive a long distance than take public transport that's free, low-effort, and much safer.
Bump
Are the tubes one way,or can I send stuff to people? If so I'm just sending random people pipe bombs.
You have to interact more when driving a car, it's just you interact from a singular enclosure trying not to get hit or scream at the bitch who just cut you off. No one wants to talk to niggas in the bus or the subway, if you have your headphones in or a book you'll be able to enjoy the trip in peace.
Yeah, the F150 or equivalent is like a uniform for (upper)middle class white guys. I have a piece of shit coloroado that I haul shit around in for work and it's significantly more dingy then their trucks with all the frills they blew 40k or so on. The cycle of debt around cars and housing that's already too much for millenials is what I would bet is going to be part of the spark that sets off a revolution, assuming Fascists don't launch a coup and slaughter us.
Yeppp. The subprime auto loan industry is outrageous right now.
is this a good or bad development? what are it's implications?
Yeah and 40 years ago my grandparents thought I'd be visiting them on the moon.
If the space race was still on with the USSR and USA racing to lay claim to bodies in the solar system, then that would have been likely.
OF COURSE it's bad, since it basically forces people to buy/lease new cars far more often than they otherwise would, raises the price of cars, raises the price of parts, and forces people to submit to pointless bureaucracy, all for the profit of big business against the consumer and hobbyist:
nytimes.com
doesn't it discourage car ownership and encourage mass transit tho? that's along the lines i was thinking with regards to such laws having an upside