Several years ago, Linus Media Group’s ShortCircuit channel began reviewing electric vehicles. At first, it seemed like an odd choice—what’s a tech channel doing reviewing cars?—but given as I don’t spend much time around cars it did seem like a good way to stay on top of what was happening in the market.

In fact, ShortCircuit now reviews cars somewhat frequently. And hey, cars are fun, right? EVs have lots of fun technology, right?

While watching the latest review, though, of the Kia EV9 (which the video description helpfully characterizes as “a HUGE new SUV that could be the go-to choice for soccer/hockey/football/skiing families everwhere”), I couldn’t help but think of the family of four wiped out, senselessly killed a few weeks ago when a driver crashed into the San Francisco bus stop where they were waiting. ShortCircuit’s review mentions the EV9’s absurd curb weight of nearly six thousand pounds, but only in the context of being impressed by the vehicle’s 0-100km/h time. There is no mention of the fact that SUVs, and especially heavier electric SUVs like the EV9, are significantly more likely to deliver fatal injuries to pedestrians in collisions than other smaller and lighter vehicles.

The reality is that cars have significant negative externalities, and electric vehicles mitigate very few of those. Swapping out cars which use other fuels for electric vehicles does nothing to address congestion in urban areas, does nothing to address pedestrian fatalities, does nothing to address microplastic pollution from tires, and so on. In fact, the added weight of electric vehicles substantially worsens road wear, generates even more microplastic pollution, worsens crashes with pedestrians and increases the probability that those crashes will lead to fatalities.

What’s especially galling about all of this is that Linus Media Group is based in Greater Vancouver, one of the most transit-friendly and active transportation-friendly regions in North America. If LMG wanted to put out transportation-themed technology content, there’s no shortage of ideas: e-bikes and e-scooters, trolleybuses operating on one of the largest networks in the world (we could talk about in-motion charging, for example) and of course, one of the largest, most successful, and most well-patronized fully automated, driverless rapid transit systems in the world, the SkyTrain! Go visit the SkyTrain OMC, and let’s have a chat about why driverless trains aren’t like driverless cars, and why rail automation makes so much more sense, particularly for greenfield development. (I suspect there are relatively few SelTrac installations still running the old OS/2-based NetTrac MT SMC, but I am sure there’s a good retrocomputing video in there somewhere!)

Anyway, back to the real world. To the best of my recollection, LMG has only ever put out two videos pertaining to active transportation (both scooter reviews by Taran Van Hemert), and not one since Taran left the organization.

Promoting cars is no longer a value-neutral act. Glorifying cars and glorifying driving, while failing to acknowledge the negative externalities which affect people on a daily basis is no longer justifiable. It’s what folks call “car brain”, what happens when our cities and towns are designed around cars rather than people, what happens when we build acres of parking that will sit empty most of the time but whose impervious surfaces pollute our waterways all the time, what happens when funding for roads and highways dwarfs funding for mass transit and active transportation. It’s not just about the cars themselves; it’s about everything that comes along with the cars. I cannot put it any better than Miner et al.:

We find that, since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion. Currently, 1 in 34 deaths are caused by automobility. Cars have exacerbated social inequities and damaged ecosystems in every global region, including in remote car-free places. While some people benefit from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it.

It doesn’t have to be like this. The car is, in broad terms, a relatively recent invention. Car-centric development patterns and car-centric ways of life are, for the most part, a post-World War II experiment. In cities all across North America, once-healthy and robust transit networks were left to rot, then dismantled to make way for cars, cars, and more cars. We can still reverse course, though. We can shift funding away from roads and highways towards transit, use tools like congestion pricing and VMT taxes to disincentivize car travel, encourage employer subsidies for mass transit (such as the wildly successful Clipper BayPass program), and work to heal the built environment, through road diets, elimination of parking minimums, highway removal, pedestrianziation, and so on.

But unless we start talking about these things, will any of this happen? So long as the predominant narrative is simply “CAR GO FAST”, no.

I’m not saying LMG shouldn’t review EVs. But what they should do is review EVs in a manner that presents the full story—negative externalities and all—and spend some time talking about the other options out there. Go for a ride on an electric bus! Review an e-bike! Ride a driverless train and bask in the glory of some of the most frequent transit in North America! It wouldn’t be that much harder, and it’s all right in their back yard.

So, how about it, Linus? Have you got your Compass Card handy?