As far as the rest of the world loving it, that's ridiculous. The mom in rural Kenya walking miles each day for water.. I bet she'd love a car. When you have to get to a meeting and its 40C outside, I'm sure a brisk walk would be just adorable.
Not everyone can afford to live within walking distance.
There's public transport, there's biking, even segways and hoverboards and those motorised skateboards everyone loves, and the list goes on. All of which are technologies which themselves can be improved too.
Taking bikes as an example, since I'm most familiar with those: Dutch infrastructure is practically built around it[0] and for the vast majority of trips, which are short-distance, it is a far better solution than cars. (of course the Netherlands is unfairly advantaged here, being compact and flat, but that does not make bikes useless elsewhere). For long distance trips a combination of public transport and a locally rented bike is usually all you need to get around. Amsterdam is a famously bike friendly capital, but all our cities are, really, and especially in smaller ones like Groningen it is the de-facto mode of transportation[1][2].
As for your Kenya example, in most contexts bikes are arguably a better solution in developing countries than cars: it needs no fuel, is simple enough to fix yourself, possible to make from local materials even (see Ghana's bamboo bikes[4] for example), less dependent on roads and existing infrastructure and still enough of a time and energy saver that it brings a lot of wealth to the people who own one.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/markenlei/videos
[1] https://vimeo.com/76207227
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...
So in this case yes, designing a better car may be a big part of the solution.
