Why not just make cars illegal? Less batteries are better for the environment. If they invested that money into more busses we would see less use of IC and lithium battery cars.
Not trolling it just makes sense. It's more efficient too. If we build and maintain a robust transit system then the need for this tech will be over. Batteries aside cars these days are full of plastic and other non-biodegrable materials, as cars are replaced the old ones just fill up junk yards. Not to say that trains of buses wouldn't fill up junk yards too but usually there is a large difference in build quality and durability between cars and buses.
Since the dawn of man, cars have been an integral part of society. I think it was Socrates who said "Why walk when you can drive a 6 cylinder plug in hybrid supercar?" -s
Why would it collapse? Odviously we would have to improve public transit first. Here in the USA outside of big cities you're lucky if your town has a local bus route. But the bus and train tech is already here. We wouldn't have to research, invent, or build new factories. We would just buy it, install, and hire operators.
We've only been practicing agriculture for like 10 000 to 14 000 years so it's indeed obvious that without cars everything would collapse. And just as recently as a few hundred years ago, the US and Canada absolutely needed cars to be developed. Before cars, humans have never been able to achieve anything significant.