Personally I'm not opposed to public transport, in fact I want to like the railway. I tried.
But the German railway is in such a poor state that I never use it.
Not for small trips (with regional trains that are covered by my 49€ ticket) and especially not for longer trips (long distance trains like ICEs).
Every time you enter an ICE just remember that its a coinflip on whether or not you'll arrive on time to get your connecting train. Or maybe you won't arrive at all, happened enough times to me that I frankly don't trust it anymore.
And considering how expensive ICE tickets have gotten... yeah I'd rather take the highway, despite that I don't like driving much.
I don't know where you drive for long car trips, but going south from e.g. Hamburg on the A1, or through the Ruhrgebiet by car is a much bigger coin flip with respect to arrival times (while always being significantly slower even on good days). So why the complains about punctionality for trains, but somehow it's fine for car travel?
Can't speak for Hamburg since I'm from the south.
And frankly, even if a car trip ends up in congestion and you need 6 hours instead of 4, its still somewhat preferable to being dropped off at some random station in the middle of nowhere in the night and hoping the last regional train at 23:48 will actually make it to its destination. (Yes this happened to me)
Every time you enter an ICE just remember that its a coinflip on whether or not you'll arrive on time to get your connecting train. Or maybe you won't arrive at all, happened enough times to me that I frankly don't trust it anymore. And considering how expensive ICE tickets have gotten... yeah I'd rather take the highway, despite that I don't like driving much.