Oh, the good old cars are freedom cliché? Thank you, I feel perfectly free when I don't have to worry about parking, gas, maintenance, taxes, inadvertently killing anyone, polluting...
The longer it'll take you to leave or organize against your leaders, the less freedom you have. See DPRK for an extreme example.
If anything in an authoritarian regime, cars would be (and were) an instrument of control.
The extra funny part is that all the car-brained ex-communist people that had to be good little comrades during the 20-year waiting list period they had to endure are now big on the 'cars = freedom' mindset... No my guy, if cars were freedom, you can be damn sure only the communist nomenclature would be allowed to have them. Instead you were humiliated with spending half your life on a waiting list, and then the only freedom you got was to continue being a subservient communist subject under the party boot. How else would you afford gasoline after all? Not that that was enough... For context, I live in a former communist country, parents and grandparents waited for 10+ years to be graced with the permission to buy a car. Then proceeded not be able to afford petrol until the early 2000s...
I bike most places but keep my car for the odd road trip or run to Ikea. But when ICE decides to shut down the interstates and round up all us commies, my car is not going to magically smuggle me 500 miles to Canada, and i can't believe people think it will
I call it 'The Handmaid's Tale' approach!
Oh no, they can demand I unlock my phone! Better remove encryption and give them permanent remote access!
Oh no, they can close off all border-crossing roads via checkpoints and stop me from leaving the country by car! Better remove cars!
Oh no, they can stop public transport! Better remove public transport!
Oh no, they can suicide me! Better remove myself!
In the case of shit hitting the fan you take what you can get and any options are welcome. I have family who died during the communist revolution and they literally went willingly to their death because if they'd run their entire families would have gotten killed, which then led to many immediate family members of the killed ones to be put in prison on bs charges out of fear of retaliation. My grandfather was literally found guilty of assisting in the murder of a national hero who died before he was born and causing one of the largest recent wars, which also happened before he was born, because his father was an intellectual that ended in a mass grave. When things get unstable all rules are out the window. Throwing your family in the car and booking it for the border would have been an option worth considering. There wasn't one though and you can't really escape by horse cart in winter with the borders of the time. Now it's all very open. Closing every single border crossing at the same time in a period of instability isn't going to be trivial.
Edit: Even without my schizo take, there's just a sort of freedom in that I can decide on the weekend that I wanna see castle, find one in a 400km radius and just beeline to it. With a bicycle that radius is 100km maybe. For me more like 70. With public transport there's a lot you can't reach and it's often more expensive.
Also,
> Closing every single border crossing at the same time in a period of instability isn't going to be trivial.
At least here in the US, literally every single border crossing is already guarded by armed men. They can already close them on a whim whenever they want.
And what does driving your car require if not a written permission slip?