Don't ICE Teslas, Bro

During my wayward youth in the Aughts/early this decade, a friend of mine decided it would be funny if he got me involved in a weird little bar game called “icing.” The idea of this game was to order your friend a Smirnoff Ice surreptitiously and/or hide it somewhere, and when he received the drink he must drop to one knee and chug it. There may be other variations to the game, but that’s all I recall.

Like many things that happened culturally during that decade, icing was quite stupid. Stupid as it was, it was also relatively harmless. The “iced” got a free drink out of it, even if it was a terrible vodka drink, and everyone else got a laugh. The late Aughts were such innocent times.

Fast-forward a decade and now there’s a new type of “icing” afoot, though it’s now called “ ICE-ing.” It has nothing to do with booze, but it still involves bros.

Reports have surfaced that truck owners have been blocking Tesla superchargers to keep Tesla owners from charging. How widespread the issue is remains unclear – the most substantial report I’ve seen involves an incident in North Carolina. Some Tesla owners are even fighting back, via a tow rope.

But even if this isn’t happening on a large scale, it’s still shitty. Preventing an EV driver from charging could leave them stranded – which at best is an inconvenience and at worst puts someone in danger.

Yeah, I get it. These truck-owning bros behind the ICE-ing may have a good reason to dislike Tesla – it’s not like Elon Musk or the brand itself have endeared themselves to people. And many Tesla drivers are well-off, financially, so they may seem easy targets (I’m putting aside the fact that many of these bro-truckers dropped a pretty penny on aftermarket upgrades for their rig).

Except, being stranded sucks no matter how big your bank account is. All these drivers want to do is get some juice so that they can go about their day. Yet a few yokels are getting some jollies at blocking chargers because, what? They want to throw up a symbolic double middle-finger salute to federal fuel-economy regs, or smug Tesla drivers, or something?

I have no doubt some Tesla drivers are smug – we’ve seen them in the comments here at times. But smugness doesn’t deserve this B.S. Imagine how righteously pissed off the rest of us would be if EV drivers blocked gas pumps.

I’m no fan of rolling coal, either, but at least that’s a relatively harmless expression of stupidity. I don’t really get why you’d need to roll coal in the face of a Prius driver for the same reasons I don’t get why bros are ICE-ing folks, but at least that lousy show of your tiny manhood doesn’t really add much pollution in the aggregate, and it won’t leave someone stuck on the side of the road.

Here’s the thing. We all live in a society, and there’s a basic unwritten contract governing our public behavior. A part of the contract states, “don’t be a dick.” I realize I sound a bit like Costanza waiting for the pay phone at the Chinese restaurant (“you know, we’re living IN A SOCIETY!”) but nevertheless, it’s true. Regardless of whether I like Tesla or not, I have no reason to go out of my way to fuck up someone else’s day just because I either don’t like their purchase or some possible future it represents. And you don’t, either.

Maybe I am just gripped with the usual New Year’s prattle about being kinder to our fellow man, but I mean it. We’re already ugly enough to one another in public and in traffic and on the internet. That’s not likely to change. But if a few of you bro-dozer drivers out there can at least have the human decency to let Tesla owners charge in peace, that’s a start.

Otherwise, I have no choice but to order Smirnoff Ices for all.

[Image: Reddit user Leicina]