We can't cherry-pick scenarios in which cars could be easily replaced by something else? Good lord, why not?! Nobody has a magic wand that we can wave to undo nearly a century of demolishing and building a landscape exclusively for cars. It's going to take incremental change to undo that, and the wise way to do that is exactly to cherry-pick the easiest scenarios and start there. Best benefits for the effort, and all. Then, as alternatives expand, those alternatives become an option, or even a better way, for more and more people.

Speaking of too-lavish conditions, that exactly describes using a 4,000lb. luxury machine to cart a 185lb. body around from point A to point B, which is located much further away from A than it needs to be, in order to accommodate the operation and storage of those machines. It's really the opposite of efficient—less than 1% of the energy in gasoline gets used to move the human.

In short, using cars stupidly describes the vast majority of how people use of cars. The reason that it seems reasonable is that everybody else is doing it. Monkey see, monkey do, eh?