Many Nissan Leaf drivers never experience this phenomena, but if you have you know exactly how close you came to Flintstoning your ass to charge somewhere.

On your dashboard when you’ve got about eight miles of juice left, you’ll see “—.” If you’re a veteran EV driver, this is nothing to you. You can probably push this, but when you push too far…you go turtle.

What is “going turtle?” When you have almost no juice left, the car goes into “turtle mode” where you are on limited power and can’t accelerate over 32 mph. You have half a mile at best to reach an electrical outlet, but it’s more like two to three blocks. You start sweating bullets when you see that little orange SOB light up on your dashboard.

When someone runs out of gas, it’s a minor inconvenience. Nobody thinks about people who’ve run their EV battery dead. What do you do when you didn’t survive turtle mode?!

Well, you don’t actually have to Flintstone it. I know that’s music to your ears because you’ve been skipping leg day for a long time now. You get a courtesy tow that has a 15 mile range. They also have to put your car on a flat-bed because it’ll damage the Leaf by towing it conventionally.

The experience of going turtle and failing will cost you a little bit of your time, but for a few fleeting moments you were about as bad-ass as an electric car driver could ever be. You pushed it to the limit; you were in the danger zone!