It's OK to like internal combustion and electric cars at the same time

Being interested in electric cars doesn’t mean you have to hate internal combustion. And vice versa. This fact I hold to be true, despite what I’ve read on the internet and in the comment sections of stories both on Autoblog and elsewhere.

Car enthusiasts are sometimes oddly selective in what they like and don’t like. You grew up in a Ford Family? Great! But does that mean you have to hate Chevy? You have a job that requires you to wear work boots and drive a pickup truck? Are you therefore inclined to hate little sports cars like the Mazda Miata?

I remember growing up as a pre-teen in Northwest Ohio (it’s not exactly wrong to call Toledo a far-flung suburb of Detroit when speaking in automotive terms) and feeling a general distaste for Japanese cars and trucks. In my young mind, the overall downturn of the Big Four (at the time, AMC was still a thing) was in large part due to the influx of imported vehicles. Naturally, I didn’t fully grasp issues like quality, customer choice, efficiency or sticker prices.

I eventually got over it. Over the first decade of my post-license life, I bought several American vehicles — from old classic muscle cars to a nearly new Dodge Stratus to a used Jeep Wrangler — and I finally bought my first Japanese car, a brand-new Mazda RX-8, in 2004. I’ve since owned several more American, Japanese and German vehicles.