Latest EV push - get them on 'subscription' and replace every 3 to 5 years like a mobile phone on a contract plan

@samueltyler2 I am not sure if they are available on lease here (UK). They are costly to buy outright and seem still to account for only a very small proportion of the total cars on the road, but that proportion is growing.

On the other hand there seems a growing proportion of younger people choosing not to have any sort of car - but a lot of that is due to the costs, especially insurance.

@ArishMell the US has terrible public transportation. This is a society based on cars. The first commercial cars were actually electric. The oil barons put an end to that. ICE vehicles have more parts, and are more complex to maintain. Such a shame.

@samueltyler2 I wish I had kept the citation but a couple of years ago I viewed an archived but fairly recent US TV documentary examining why the country's railways have never really modernised.

Long-distance passenger services are hampered by the sheer size of the continent, although it works elsewhere in the world, so air travel became an obvious competitor for trans-continental journeys. Nevertheless the programme did show how the oil and automotive industries mounted massive campaigns in the 1940s and 50s to ensure that social reliance on cars.

The US railways system does move gigantic tonnages of goods, mainly bulk commodities and containers. It seems though to have few equivalents of even Britain's "High-Speed Trains" (Diesel and now also electric versions up to 125mph on conventional lines), and none of France's "TGV" (all-electric, nearly 200mph on specially-built lines) for passengers.

I gather there is a controversial High-Speed line being built in California, and 80-90mph trains routinely elsewhere on Amtrak rails, but the majority of the system is not even electrified.
.

The UK nearly went that way in the 1960s with the infamous "Beeching Plan" closing not only hundreds of miles of loss-making rural branch-lines, but even chopping parallel and interconnecting main line routes. Dr. Richard Beeching takes all the flak but he was doing as bidden by the then Minister for Transport, Ernest Marples, who was pro-road to the extent of having a large shares holding in the country's biggest motorway-building firm. To remove the conflict of interest Mr. Marples duly sold the shares... to Mrs. Marples.

Large regions of the UK network are electrically-powered but there are still important main-line gaps as well as secondary routes still needing Diesel traction. Development of hydrogen (ic. or fuel-cells) alternatives is in progress.

Excepting occasional charter "specials" with heritage steam or Diesel traction, all standard passenger trains are double-ended, so no running-round of locomotives for the return trip; and all main-line freight locomotives are double-cabbed, so though they have to run round the train they don't need turning. This is common across much of Europe, too.

I have the impression all cross-country passenger and goods trains in the US, and heavy goods in some other countries, still use single-cab Diesel locomotives. That surprises me because it was not long before the designers realised you can put a cab at both ends of a Diesel or electric locomotive or multiple-unit train!

.
Is there still a large car-building industry in America? One PM correspondent on here once showed me photographs of one former factory (Packard, in Seattle??) now just an empty, ugly ruin. I wonder if the company had made a mistake so many manufacturers have done over the last 100 years and more, of complacency and perhaps share-holder greed preventing sufficient investment in new designs and methods, so they eventually fall by the wayside.

The big worry now is China's policy of building low-cost EVs at prodigious rates to undercut US and European manufacturers, to push out of business those companies China has not already bought. (E.g. Sweden's Volvo, Britain's MG, brands. The MG factory in China is making very expensive, high-performance MG-badged EVs, but in China with Chinese employees.)

@ArishMell There are areas in the US that have electrified rails, primarily those that operate in tunnels. Outside of those, most are diesel.

The US once had a huge automotive industry. They became arrogant though and the foreign markets took over much of it. Now they are concentrating on trucks and SUVS, eliminated sedans almost entirely. They opted to allow the EV industry to be dominated by Musk and his Teslas and overseas manufacturers, and now complain the Chinese have take over too much of that.

@samueltyler2 The way the railways in Britain were electrified was rather patchy.

The London Underground was probably first, simply because operating steam locomotives in tunnels is not exactly easy or pleasant!

Electrification of the sprawling tangle of conventional overground lines around London and South-East of England, started in the 1890s I think, eventually extending as far South-West as Bournemouth, about 100 miles away. They used third-rail electrification.

One unusual example was that after steam traction ended in 1968 the remaining 30 miles from Bournemouth to Weymouth used "electro-diesel" locomotives. These ran on electric motors to the end of the third rail then switched to a Diesel engine. Eventually that last 30 miles was electrified too and the service became operated throughout by electric multiple unit trains (no separate locomotive).

Elsewhere used various, self-contained Diesel and Diesel-electric locos.

The railways were nationalised in 1948, and in the 1960s British Railways as it was called, started a major modernisation programme. Electrification using overhead wires started from London North and NW-wards, but this has not happened Westwards to the cities there and in South Wales. The "Eurostar" services between London, Brussels and Paris via the Channel Tunnel, are fully electric.

So there are still big areas without volts, and a large, complicated and very busy region not compatible with the others that do!

.....

The fate of the British car industry was a mixture of low investment, complacency, a reputation not always deserved for poor design and workmanship (the bad ones spoil everyone's reputation), and cripplingly bad industrial relations especially in the 1960s. The trouble there was on both sides. Many firms that had not gone out of business or swallowed by the larger were taken over by foreign ones, mainly American and French.

Ford established a British factory way back (1920s?) and kept its identity.

Eventually the Japanese manufacturers did something others did not do: they learnt from their early design and quality mistakes, and even built factories in Britain.

Who owns whom now though is an international tangle, leading to a lot of transporting parts one way, sub-assemblies another, from country to country until arriving at the vehicle assembly plant itself.

I listened to a programme on the radio a while back, in which former union representatives and managers recalled their experiences in the 1960s. They admitted their own parts in it all, but also commented that one of the first things the Japanese did when taking over an existing factory was refurbish and modernise it thoroughly, turning it from filthy and neglected into one far cleaner and pleasant to work in. They also introduced much better QA practices.

....

I have an engineers' text-book published some time around 1910 - 1920. It doesn't have a date in so I worked it out by some detective work!

This describes in detail electric railway systems, and has a sizeable chapter on battery-electric cars and small commercial vehicles being developed in Britain, France and the USA in the 1900s. These cars were permitted on the roads through London's Royal Parks, which excluded the new-fangled petrol ones on fumes and noise grounds!

@ArishMell thanks.