Private cars account for approximately 13% of Europe’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet climate impact is only part of the problem.

For everyday mobility, cars are fundamentally inefficient and oversized.
A typical car consumes around 10 to 100 times more energy per kilometer than a bicycle, while carrying on average 1.4 people in a 5-seat vehicle.

Most of the climate impact of cars comes from ordinary daily use: roughly 80% of car kilometres and thus emissions, are accumulated on days with less than 50 km of driving. These journeys rarely require long range, high speed, or large payloads, yet they are made with vehicles weighing over a ton and designed for highways.

This mismatch creates cascading effects:

• Traffic congestion, because large vehicles occupy too much road space compared the number of people moved.
• Parking shortages, as each trip requires storage at both ends.
• Noise and danger, particularly in dense urban environments.

Cars also impose a heavy land footprint.
Roads, parking spaces, and safety margins reshape cities around the car’s worst-case size. Urban space is consumed by vehicles, pushing destinations farther apart and reinforcing car dependency.

Alternatives for short trips exist like bikes and e-bikes or public transport yet they are not widely adopted. Furthermore, in rural areas, options are often even more limited: low population density can make public transport economically unviable, and distances are often too great for bikes or e-bikes to be practical. This is not a failure of individuals, but of systems and design: in cities, habits, perceived safety, physical effort, exposure to weather, time variability, and the cognitive load of trip chaining favor the car; in rural areas, long distances and limited transport options make it the only feasible choice, even if inefficient.

The core issue is not that people choose cars.
It is that cars have become the default solution to problems they were never meant to solve.