#BackLivesMatter - Riding In Tesla's Rumble Seat Will Get You A Chat With The Cops

“WE GOT A CALL A FEW MINUTES AGO… SOMEBODY PUT A CHILD IN THE TRUNK.”

Uh-oh, Spaghetti-O’s!

When I first heard about this video a couple of days ago, I had what I’ll call the Typical Car Guy’s Reaction: Those stupid pigs. Why are they harassing a family with a Tesla? What percentage of criminal behavior in the country is perpetrated by people who own Teslas? Is it because the people in the video aren’t lily-white? Is it because the cops were bored? Because they wanted to exercise their authority on yet another hapless family of meek motorists?

Every anti-police cliche ran through my head. It didn’t help to actually watch the video and see the cop order the little kid back into the car like he was El Chapo or something.

But then I watched the dad walk around to the back and press the trunk release button and… the trunk opens… and the kid gets out. And under no circumstances is the man or woman on the street going to see that as anything but putting children in the trunk. The fact that they’re actually being put into rear-facing child seats of reasonable safety is besides the point. You’re putting them in there by opening a trunk/hatchback.

I’m betting that you wouldn’t get that call if the family had been driving a (nonexistent) Tesla station wagon. While most of America has forgotten the era of station wagons with rear-facing seats, we’ve all seen people get into a Toyota Land Cruiser or Land Rover Discovery through the back door. It’s also faster sometimes to have children pile into a Suburban or Tahoe through the cargo entrance.

The Model S, on the other hand, looks like a fastback sedan. It’s a pretty direct rip of the Jaguar XF, visually speaking. If you saw somebody putting kids in the trunk of an XF you’d probably call the cops assuming you didn’t just walk over and discuss it with the driver directly. So what makes the Tesla any different? You might personally know that it has rear-facing seats, but should every man, woman, and child in America have to know this? Should we all have to memorize certain weights and capacities? If you see somebody putting six adults in the back of an F-150, should you be required to do the math real quick and check total load against acceptable payload?

It is therefore reasonable to think that, until the Model S has the same kind of mindshare with the American public that the VW Beetle had in 1970, people will find it unusual or scary that children appear to be climbing in and out of the trunk of a sedan. And some of those people will care enough about the welfare of said children that they are going to call the police about it. You might not like that — you might not like the idea of other adults judging you for what you do with your kids — but it’s how America used to work all the time and it’s going to stick around in some sort of vestigial-tail situation until every bit of pre-Vietnam culture in this country is cauterized with the hot wire of media re-education.

The only reason this sort of thing isn’t happening more often is simple: Ninety-five percent of the time the Beings of Light who purchase Teslas are far too enlightened and post-modern to become involved with anything as disgusting and messy and hick-ish as the actual conception and parenting of children. They’re far more likely to have “fur babies” than they are to have real babies. The enclaves where Teslas dwell are only slightly less child-free than was London in “Children of Men” and the appearance of actual children in those walled gardens usually only evokes disgust from the latte-sipping knowledge engineers who have difficulty conceiving of an existence without the FitBit and the smartphone and the domestic servant.

Those of you who see the jump seats of Teslas as the identical solution for a four-child family are beneath the notice and contempt of people who consider bearing four children to be a crime against the Mother Earth Gaia and/or the environment. You’re like all the old people who bought a Scion xB because it had a high hip point and a seniors-friendly MSRP; the entire marketing department despairs at your existence and is willing to spend millions of dollars to deny it.

Should families with a normal (pre-1999) number of children consider a Tesla? Maybe, maybe not. I rather think they’d be safer in a Tesla than they would be a Lexus GX 460, both from a passive and active safety standpoint.

But there’s something to be said about not having an interaction with the police. Nothing good ever comes from being pulled over. The best thing that can happen is that you lose half an hour of your life and you’re exposed to oncoming traffic. The worst thing that can happen when you accidentally enrage a police officer… well, we all know what that is. Would you want to be shot down like a dog in front of your children, just because you had an electric car and a chip on your shoulder? It’s worth considering.

Or you can make the kids climb through the gap between the middle row and the rear seat. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s not fatal, right?