I'm genuinely curious what the typical Redditor thinks the solution to "Car Problem" is.
It's honestly pretty retarded, but their solution to the car problem is to just ban all cars and worry about the consequences later. Everything will be bicycles and trains only, so essentially you have to live in a ridiculously tightly packed urban area and can only travel to other ridiculously tightly packed urban areas by meme trains and the rest of the world will be an abandoned wasteland or something. As for how anyone will get any food, uhhhh I guess urban farms??? I don't think they've thought that far ahead.
Real solution to cars is to just to incentivize smaller cars and alternative transportation options like scooters and motorcycles. Like, Japan is thinking about derestricting 125cc or less motorbikes and allowing them to be driven on a normal driving license, which I think could work here for cheap, reliable, and dead simple urban transportation that doesn't require huge sacrifices in range and capacity.
Naturally tho, even as a huge motorbike fag, I'll admit that I still own a car and I won't get rid of it any time soon. I can pull off a lot on by back seat with a couple of Rok Straps (btw highly recommend those if you have a moto), but there are a lot of items you just need a car to do. Passengers being a major one, as carrying around enough gear for two riders is a lot and the passenger accommodations on most bikes are adequate at best to outright terrible at worst. Ultimately, there is no solution to the car because the car is perfect for most people.
As for the auto industry, honestly I think it will be self sorting. Right now they're paying for decades of terribad business strategies and in general a stupidly oversaturated market with next to no margins. Too many people are selling essentially the same thing and there just isn't enough market capacity for it all. The automakers have been able to push this off by using financing to push consumers upmarket where the margins are better (which is where the real issue with car pricing lies, carmakers refuse to sell low end products because they make no money). The issue is, the market can't really sustain these prices forever, and now they are taking on a lot of pretty sketchy debt in their financing wings.
Once it implodes, companies will look to cheapen their shit up again since noone can afford it otherwise since financing will be much more difficult for subprime borrowers.
This is all on top of the auto industries EV problem (automakers are trying to devote their entire production capacities chasing the EV dragon despite EV demand remaining relatively constant and not even coming close to scaling with their production capacity).
Tl;dr automakers are retarded and have coasted for a while on cheap hacks that have kept them in the green, but their retardation is gonna face a reckoning soon which will probably benefit consumers in the end.