Celebrating 200 Years
HUMOR

The road to hating electric cars

I love the environment. I use recyclable straws that disintegrate in my mouth. I have at least twenty free tote bags with cheesy slogans from eco-charities. If I knew where to apply, I would be the hands washing the ducks on Dawn bottles, but I draw the line at electric vehicles. These nightmares have ironically made my love for the outdoors stop as swiftly as their brake pads. 

You may be asking where this hatred developed? I take you back to my senior year of high school. College visits were in full swing, and my next tour was going to take me to the mythical land of peaches, sweet tea and mosquitoes the size of my fist. I headed to South Carolina dreaming of escaping the nightmare of Cleveland winters and quarterbacks to officially call myself a Clemson University Tiger.

The day finally came when my mom and I began our journey to what I assumed would be a tropical campus. It was actually a temperate 65; I had never been to the South. As our plane touched down, I was ecstatic; the only thing stopping me from getting my free purple-and-orange tour shirt was the dreaded rental car line. This was a line out of a Black Friday horror movie: long, winding and 100 degrees.

We finally made it to the front. The woman behind the counter informed us, “We only have electric vehicles left.” Initially, this was so cool. As previously mentioned, I am a big fan of the environment and a nerd; the weekend couldn’t get any better! Little did we know, we had just begun a 48-hour “Goonies”-style adventure ending in stolen money, broken laws and torture.

When we started our two-hour drive, the car was 100% charged. The first twenty minutes of the trip went smoothly; we laughed, listened to music and even saw a water tower shaped like a peach — how cheeky! Then, around minute 28, my mother glanced down at the dashboard. We were at 72%. 

We pulled into a random parking lot with an EV charger. As two amateurs we assumed charging the car would be like refilling a tank of gas. We could not have been more wrong. After a solid thirty minutes of reading the 500-page owner’s manual, not knowing where the charging portal was, and uploading twenty dollars into a sketchy app (which still has my money…I told you there would be theft); we were at a loss! We jumped back in the car and prayed we would make it to campus before we lost power in the middle of a field and became the victims of an episode of SVU South Carolina. 

We made it to our tour and … I was not a fan. The free shirt was not even that great. But my opinions regarding the school were quickly eclipsed by the fact that we were now at 10% and had nowhere to charge our car. After scouring the entire cabin, we found a charging cord in a hidden compartment that not even Elon Musk could discover. We managed to get the car to our hotel and plug it into the only available outlet, directly in front of the lobby doors, in a fire zone. (Otherwise known as the most illegal parking spot known to man.)

Thankfully, the hotel didn’t burn down, and by morning, we were ready to hit the road full of caffeine and hope. Then we discovered the car had only charged 20%. The rest of the journey was, for lack of a better word … difficult. We realized that to preserve the battery, you couldn’t use the heater or radio, which, to me, was torture. We finally made it back to the rental place, nearly having to push the car up the driveway. 

Ultimately, I did not go to Clemson (shocker) and we made our flight back to the freezing but mostly gas-fueled state of Ohio. The moral of this story is: just take the Uber! You may get kidnapped, or worse, get a talkative driver, but at least you won’t be published in a student newspaper trashing a machine meant to save the Earth. I’m sorry, turtles; I’ll try biking.

strebymk@miamioh.edu

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