All those things had a cost, for example buying of a gas boiler, fitting seatbelts, purchasing of safety equipment, etc.
Of course there's options for most travel within the UK and many of those are likely (when considered as a whole) not to be too different from car ownership, although they may have limitations.
However before I go further this needs covering:
About 85% of the UK live with urban areas (a settlement of over 10,000 people) with probably quite a lot of the rest living in settlements of between 5,000 and 10,000 (for example you'd need 3 villages of 2,000 people to match that of one village of 6,000, whilst you'd need 12 villages of 500 to get to the same number, by the time you're down to hamlets of less than 50 people you'd need over 120 to get to the same number of people).
As such, whilst there's a LOT of the country which isn't urban there's very few people who live there.
As such why is it that there's currently more cars than there are people who pay income tax? Given that there's a good chance that many could replace their car with an e-bike for the majority of their day to day travel. Being urbanites out should be possible for there to be car clubs provided to cover most of the rest which isn't viable by public transport.
Especially given there's about 50% of the population who now have the ability to do hybrid working, so getting to and from work isn't an every day issue.
Whilst public transport is expensive on a PAYG basis, it's often not if you can use season tickets of some variety when compared to the total annual cost of car ownership (the average of which is over £3,000, with few being able to achieve it for much under £2,000).
That's before you consider other costs, such as owning a driveway and/or a garage (the latter is often one of the largest indoor single spaces/rooms that people have) and how little actual benefit people get from it.
Yes there's a need for the poor and those in rural areas, however cars aren't the right answer.
The problem is, too many children have been brought up getting driven to school, which means as an adult their default is to then own a car and drive. To give one example a child was picked up by a friend's parent, the first question which was asked was "where's the car?" The plan was walk then the 1,200m to their home, as that's not an unreasonable distance for a child to be able to walk (the other children were going to be walking further as they then had to walk back to their home).
It wasn't raining or cold, there was no need to be somewhere at a given time, so it was fairly reasonable to walk it.
Now tell me that when that child grows up that they are not likely to default to driving for almost every trip even though walking may be a suitable option for at least some of those trips. (Yes it may be that they surprise me, however the likelihood is that I won't be surprised).
The reason being is that once you've taught a child something it's then hard to unteach the adult that they become. Even in a forum which is fairly pro rail, making the suggestion that people use their car less doesn't go down well (few because they are also not using their car very much).
Cars are a useful tool, however just because they are useful doesn't mean that they should be the only way people get around. The old adjudge that every problem looks like a nail when you own a hammer springs to mind. In that every trip looks like it needs to be driven when you have paid a lot of upfront costs to own a car and the extra for (almost) just the extra petrol isn't that much so why bother walking?
EV's are (realistically) no better or worse for a lot of people than ICE's (other than improved air quality) they just have different advantages and different disadvantages and so it's a case of how much will they impact you (probably less than many fear - in that on average 8 trips a year are over 50 miles), the answer is likely to be hardly at all.
As to the extra cost of EV's over ICE's if 20 years ago were told that all new cars were to be required by law to have AC installed there would be lots of fuss about only high end cars have it, or that those with it are more expensive than those without it and so many of the complaints about such a rule would be very similar to the ban on new ICE vehicles. However we are now at the point where AC is fairly hard to find not installed in a car, even cars which had it and it's failed, and yet more people own more cars than they ever did in the past.
I think I've probably said enough things to upset quite a lot of people (blaming their parents for making them lazy and unable to walk when they could do, just for starters - if that's how you choose to read what I've said).
