Cars are not alive, let alone sentient, so it is no more possible to punish them than it is a rock or a pane of glass.

Perhaps you do believe cars are sentient and capable of receiving punishment. But if not, you might have been using “cars” as a de-personifying shorthand for “drivers”. In which case, yes, drivers should be punished — not for merely existing, no, but for the harm they have caused to non-drivers. From traffic fatalities to car-only infrastructure, drivers and their insistence on cars have been to the detriment of the rest of us.