it’s gotta be some sort of mental pathology, surely

It’s commonly said in scifi that any spacecraft is a warhead whose yield is only limited by how much fuel you have to accelerate it with.
The same basically applies to cars.

baffling that this isn’t bog standard anywhere that isn’t horribly car dependent.

Like, we have a bunch of big factories basically smack in the middle of my town, and people continue to drive the like 5 kilometers there EVERY SINGLE DAY even when they know for a fact that fistfights break out over parking spaces and the weather is perfect.
I genuinely wonder if there’s anything that could convince these people to stop driving, if they’d drive to work even if there was a 50% chance of being shot in the face when exiting the car.