Sudden Urge.

Do it and don't hold back that smug.

 

If you feel the urge again be prepared to have McDonald's cups and gas caps chucked at you. Gas guzzlers are an angry bunch. Proceed with cauton!

 

Are there people in Ft Worth without concealed carry permits?

 

While I understand why you'd want to do that, I just don't condone it.

You are a fortunate person who is able to afford a Leaf. You really have no idea what the people's finances are like at the gas station. Sure some of them are smug and drive giant SUVs and could afford a Prius, Leaf or Hybrid SUV, but that's not fair to lump everyone at a gas station into one big group.

 

The thing about smugness is there's always someone more smugly out there ready to out-smug you. Unless you're growing your own trees to fell ... to build your own home - from where you walk to the pristine organic vegtable garden to grow your own food. We all perform some degree of fouling our environment.


But yea ... like the post states above, it costs a ton to live in modern society, and guzzler vehicles are cheep. Unless you live in a Menonite or Amish community, you're gona need a lot of dough to "do what's best".

 

Darell once posted something he likes to do: Drive his Rav4EV into a gas station, get out, walk all the way around it pretending to look confused, and then slap his forehead and say loudly, "Oh! I forgot. This car doesn't use any gas!" and then get back in and drive away.

I'd be afraid to do that. I bought myself a windshield cleaner thingy because I'm even afraid to go to a gas station to use the windshield washer stuff when I'm not buying any gas.

Driving electric is so great that even when I was driving the Xebra, with all its shortcomings, I preferred it over the more comfortable and much more powerful Prius.

 

We call those people SUV drivers.

SUV drivers tend to have small brains and resort to barbaric behavior - with a little thought, you should have no problem outsmarting them.

(you can start a website and sell the gas caps back to them at $50 a piece (probably less than the dealer charges), and if the coffee cups are reusable, you can sell those too)

 

Thanks for posting this, goober_nut. I'll admit, I was resistant to buying a Prius for a long time because of people who have exactly that attitude. I don't want to seen as "better than you" and I don't feel like I am necessarily. Is it the right choice? Sure, for a lot of people. Is it feasible for everyone? Probably not. Priuses aren't necessarily expensive, but they are more expensive than used cars and cheap hand-me-downs.

Personally, I'd rather see a more understated group of Prius owners who worry more about leading by example than proselytizing. I'm not say everyone (or even anyone) in these forums does that. I'm just saying, the OP's initial sentiment, while one I share, isn't a productive one. I also commend the OP on restraining themselves from doing what we all want to...but hopefully most of us don't

 

I don't believe you.

I don't believe it was a "sudden urge".

You bought a Leaf. An early adopter of one of the first mass produced and available fully electric vehicles. This decision I'm guessing wasn't sudden, and it included the full knowledge that you would be exchanging periodic trips to the gas station for routine periods of recharging.

Regardless of whether the innocent crowd at the gas station would of recognized that you were priviledged enough to be driving a Leaf, I think it's a good thing you decided against your spontaneous demonstration of smug self righteousness. It's exactly that attitude that creates an undercurrent of dislike for anyone trying to promote an alternative means of transportation.

Heaven forbid that you ever exceed your charge range in your Leaf and find yourself stranded on the road side awaiting a gas guzzling tow truck. You might hear the very refrain you had the urge to yell at others..yelled at you.

And in either case it would be the wrong thing to do.

 

Not all gasoline buyers are equal. There are the folks who cannot afford even a used Prius, much less a new Leaf or (heaven forfend!) a Tesla. They drive a $500 or a $3,000 used car and have to buy gas for it so they can get to work. Taunting them is nasty. Then there are the folks who drive $40,000 SUVs to the grocery store etc. They deserve taunting. They've bought into the lies that bigger is safer, or that we have 500 years of petroleum reserves, or they just don't give a damn and figure if it's going to run out they might as well burn as much of it for themselves as they can.

For me, I'm satisfied to feel smug quietly as I drive by gas stations. And I tell everyone who shows an interest that my car is 100% electric and is faster off the line than any gas car, so that they'll begin to think of EVs as "real" cars, not golf carts (as they thought with my Xebra).

 

Maybe what's wanted is a guerilla propaganda campaign: Make a bunch of stickers, large enough to cover the window of a gas pump, and surreptitiously paste them on gas pumps. Depending on your attitude about damaging property, the sticky could be easily removable (a la 3M Post-It notes) or not.

The posters would say: "If you were driving an electric car you would pay 3 cents per mile for "fuel" and you'd never have to stop here."

 

How many of them had brand new cars? The leaf is fairly new. I don't think it would be prudent for the general public to buy something every time a new product came out. Plus, we don't know the circumstances for which they bought their vehicles. Maybe they actually do need the extra space of an SUV.

I also don't think screaming out 'suckers' and making fun of a bunch of people is a great way to spread EV awareness. That said, if you really want to spread awareness why don't you create small pamphlets that you can hand out to people at a gas station? provided the gas station would even let you do something like that...