I bought an electric car last summer, and the gas station and I simply stopped calling each other, the way you drift from a college roommate who was never a friend so much as a circumstance. This was not a boycott. There was no resolution, no vision board. Sometime in the spring I drove past the Shell on Route 9 and felt what you feel passing the old roommate’s building, which is to say almost nothing, and only briefly.
The ritual that replaced it takes four seconds. I pull into the garage at night, lift a cable off the wall, and click it into the fender. In the morning the car is full. That is the entire procedure. It is charging a phone, except the phone weighs two and a half tons and holds my golf clubs. No loyalty program, no screen at the pump playing celebrity news at a volume calibrated for airfields, no question about whether I would like a car wash today. The car and the wall settle it between themselves, overnight, like adults.
The old liturgy, performed weekly for thirty-odd years: the detour, the wait behind a sedan whose owner had gone inside and evidently started a new life there, the keypad demanding my zip code as though we were dating, the receipt question, the January pump handle cold enough to warrant a formal complaint. Call it eight minutes a week. Over three decades, that is a respectable European vacation, spent standing on concrete, breathing fumes.
The quiet part
Nobody warns you about the stoplights. The first week, sitting at a red, I kept assuming the car had stalled. It had not. It was not doing anything, because nothing needed doing. There is no idle. There is the turn signal, ticking like a polite clock, and whatever my wife is saying, which I can now hear in full for the first time in our marriage. The silence is not dramatic. It is the silence of a problem that has been dismissed.
The range anxiety was real. It lasted about three weeks. I checked the remaining miles the way a man checks a pot roast — too often, changing nothing. Somewhere in week four, the anxiety completed its life cycle and became indifference. The car has a range. My life has a radius. The first number is larger than the second every day, and I stopped doing the arithmetic for the same reason I stopped doing long division: it is handled.
Torque, briefly
Then there is the acceleration, which I mention reluctantly, because this is the part where converts sound like converts. An electric motor delivers everything at once. No downshift, no gathering roar, no announcement of intent. You ask, and it has already happened. Merging onto the interstate used to be a negotiation. It is now a signature.
It is the only midlife thrill that requires neither a motorcycle nor a conversation with my insurance agent.
It costs nothing extra. It alarms no one. Passengers braced for an engine note get a firm shove and their own thoughts. A man my age is offered few new pleasures that his cardiologist, his accountant, and his wife can all approve in the same afternoon.
A partial audit of things I do not miss: paying inside, ever, for any reason. The walk past the jerky wall. The squeegee bucket — that municipal gray water of unknowable vintage, shared by every windshield in the county, its handle somehow wetter than the water. The film it left on the glass, which never cleaned anything so much as redistributed the problem. Gone, all of it, unmourned.
The honest column
This is not a conversion story, and I am not carrying leaflets, so here is the other side of the ledger. Road trips require thought. Not much — an app, a glance at the map the night before, charging stops that prefer to double as lunch stops. About forty minutes at a fast charger, which is either an ordeal or a sandwich, depending on your relationship with sitting down. I now know which chargers sit near decent coffee. That is planning, and planning is a tax: it exists, it is light, and it comes due twice a year instead of every Tuesday.
People ask if I did it for the environment. I am told the planet appreciates the gesture; the planet has not written. I did it for the garage, the silence, the four seconds, the shove. Twelve months, nine thousand miles, zero squeegees. The greater good is welcome to ride along.
I sleep through the goodbye now. The car handles it overnight, in the garage.
