The thing a car replacement requires is weatherproofing. Otherwise you’ll take the car when it’s cold, when it’s raining, when it’s snowing, when it rained the night before. where I live, that means you can’t ride a bike for 9 months a year more or less.

Someday I’d like to build a recumbent electric bicycle with a heavy tarp shell to protect from wind and water. If it’s street legal and cheap enough, I think it could completely replace cars for a lot of people who don’t really need a big expensive thing that requires gasoline and oil changes and insurance and licensing and plates.

Unlike recreating the automobile, you could get away with a relatively inexpensive battery so if it dies you just replace it, and instead of burning energy to heat the battery all the time, you could just bring it inside when you’re not using it.

For extreme weather you can even go one step further and put in a drill battery powered heater to make the enclosure tolerable in the winter.