The phantom liberty expansion is out now, and something to note is just how many roads and cars are in the game considering... well... how are they still burning fossil fuels in 2077?
Something interesting about it is how the game now reads like Grand Theft Auto in the dystopian future. Cars exist so you must be able to drive and shoot out of them and there must be cops and there must be traffic and... all of that is sort of meaningless in that universe. So much of the marketing is set around cars, but if they got rid of the cars, if cars weren't there, then maybe they would have put more effort into the other systems.
Maybe the broken systems just wouldn't need to be built, because so many of them are shoehorned in around cars.
EDIT: wanted to address the comments here as they are all very similarly themed:
I am not talking about the fiction, I am talking about the game design. Yes it's a dystopia but that's not why the game is buggy or boring. Having cars in the fiction means the game must add mechanics to drive and get new cars and vehicular combat. Once there's so much car stuff, the game feels like GTA, which prompts people to make comparisons, which means CDPR needs even more GTA-like mechanics. That's time which could have gone into more RPG mechanics, better missions, etc.
The only time I was talking about the fiction was in reference to how much would cost to own a car, including roads and so on. Why isn't every road pay per use? Why isn't biofuel like $20 a litre? But that would be oppressive to drive in, and because it's a power fantasy, all of that goes by the wayside.
Overall my point was that just as cars dominate the city scape of the present, so they dominate the game design of everything where cars are present.
TIL. Nevertheless, it must cost a lot more than it does in game.
I don't understand why you think that biofuel would be cost prohibitive in a world with literal robots, sword arms, guns with tracking bullets the ability to jack-in to cyberspace and hack shit with your mind?
Plus it's not like 20 eddies a litre would be cost prohibitive anyway? You drop 10-15k on implants all the time.
As others have pointed out, it is intentionally meant to be a dystopian future, that is to say, a shit one. So the car prevalence could be intentional. (Also there is a public transit system in the lore, it's just not working in the game because they never finished it.)
All the stuff you talk about is either hard sci-fi, or an inch away from hard sci-fi. A car that is efficient and makes a vroom vroom noise is not hard sci-fi. It's fantasy.
This part is a fair point, you are incredibly consequential in the world, but that kind of adds to the idea that a car is not something everyday people can afford.
Maybe. Lore states that it's vastly fuel efficient so youd only stop by on a very infrequent basis to top up. Like oil changes.