Can we say "taking too much car"?

Question

Here is such a sentence on a workbook for middle-school students in China:

Because they think taking too much car is bad for the environment.

I suspect the use of “taking too much car” here is Chinglish and would not be acceptable to native English speakers.

But another Chinese teacher said that the noun car here could be understood as an abstract noun, and therefore could be modified by too much.

So I wonder what you native speakers think of the sentence. Do English-speaking people speak that way?

Answer 1

You can say:

I take too much coffee

and

She takes too much time

However the expression: take car is really rare and as Mitch correctly pointed out it is not idiomatic. Native speakers would not normally say this. I fail to see how "car" could be interpreted as an abstract noun as one Chinese teacher suggested. You can however say

Take the car out for a drive."

This is easily understood and does not sound odd at all. Taking too much the car out for a drive sounds stilted; personally, I would never use it. If the speaker (or school text book in this case) wishes to communicate the opinion that the frequency in which cars are used is toxic for our health then something along the lines of

Because they think taking the car too often is bad/harmful for the environment.

is I believe, more natural sounding.

Answer 2

I don't think English supports this type of usage. In your context, taking cars sounds incorrect. Seems like a car is being taken from someone (as if the car is such a small/portable-by-hand object). Car being used as an abstract noun is uncommon. In fact, I have never come across any such usage.

In English, this sentence can be modified as:

Because they think using too many cars is bad for the environment.

Answer 3

The problem here is that too much is equally happy to function as both an adjective and an adverb, depending on placement. When you say “take too much car”, it’s like “taking too much whiskey”: it becomes an adjective applying to the noun that follows it.

To make it an adverb, you have to move it to a place that adjectives don’t usually go, which leads to “taking the car too much”.

Answer 4

I can say

A Cadillac Escalade is too much car for me.

because it's too large, and has too many luxury features, so I'd rather drive a simpler car.

But when it comes to taking the car, I can't take a little bit of car or a lot of car. I can only drive exactly one car at a time, so I have to either take the car or not take a car at all.

As others have pointed out, the phrase you probably want is

Taking the car too much is bad for the environment.