One of the most dreadful moments anyone can experience on the road is the feeling of your body betraying you. Your head starts feeling off, and your stomach begins churning. It may even hurt to look out of the windows. Yep, you’re sick in a car, and this is only just the beginning of a nightmare. But this sickness doesn’t always seem so straightforward. What weird ways have cars made you sick?
It took me a while to realize that getting carsick was normal for some folks. The first time I remember getting carsick was in 2006 or 2007 when I rode in the back of my family’s 2003 Oldsmobile Silhouette minivan. I was barely 13 or 14 at the time. We were driving to Chicago and I remember trying to focus on my PlayStation Portable when I was overwhelmed with dizziness and a headache. I was too young to understand what was going on, and I sort of just said nothing and sat there for the whole trip in a whirlwind of terribleness.
Then, I rode in cars for years without it ever happening again.
Things changed in 2019. I had a girlfriend at the time who fancied herself as a Speed Racer type. She blasted down the road in her Kia at speeds that, in that compact hatch, felt like Mach 1. If she did it with me in the car, I got violently ill every single time. It would get bad enough that, if I knew she was driving us somewhere, I’d take the strongest headache pills I could find before getting into the car. If I didn’t, there was a non-zero chance I’d end up hunched over on the side of the road.
I also noticed that I got sick in other cars, too. These people didn’t drive like they were an hour late for the most important event in their lives, but normally. It took me a while to figure out that in all of these instances where the driver wasn’t racing, I was looking at my phone. If I didn’t look at my phone, I didn’t get sick.
This was only reinforced when I met my wife in 2020. Now, I love my life so very much. But she readily admits that she’s not a great driver. When I met her, I noticed that she didn’t give a constant throttle, but pulses the throttle by repeatedly pushing and then letting go of the pedal. Most times she braked also felt like panic stops. Add it all up and, if I looked at my phone, boom, I got violently ill.
Weirdly, this didn’t happen when Sheryl owned her BMW E39, and I chalk that up to the BMW being so smooth that even rough driving feels a lot less chaotic. As for those years I went without getting sick? I realized that, back then, I was almost always the driver, and phones weren’t as deeply rooted in society yet.
Still, I used to feel deeply embarrassed about this. How can a car enthusiast get sick so easily when riding in a car?
I would later find out that I am not alone. There are other people like me who get sick in cars when they are not the driver. There’s even a whole phenomenon of people who apparently get sick when they’re passengers in certain EVs. Humans are weird! In a way, this Autopian Asks is really just a way for me to tell you that you are not alone.
Of course, there are a lot of ways to get sick in a car. Maybe you get tired because of the fumes from the exhaust leak you haven’t fixed. Or, maybe you feel “high” from that leaky gas tank. Or, even perhaps you somehow catch a cold when you drive.
I want to know. Are there some weird ways cars have made you sick? Is there something that you just cannot do in a car or else you’ll get sick?
I have been carsick one time. I was at the Mid-Ohio driving school and one of the instructors was a former Indycar driver. He loaded 7 of us into a Honda Odyssey to do a few laps. I sat in the middle of the center row. He did not go easy, I did not feel well.
A friend of mine had an old oldsmobile station wagon with the diesel in it. It was beige with a beige interior and covered in soot because he never washed it. It was the only vehicle I ever got carsick in. We were going to the funeral for another friend after he was killed working as a logger in Idaho. Iwas riding in the backward facing seat and between the fumes, the heat, the orientation, and the emotional state, I had Paul roll down the rear window just in case. The exhaust coming in through the leaky tailpipe didn’t change with the window down.
High end (700+ HP) BEV acceleration is not pleasurable as a passenger.
I’m fine, but I’ve driven enough weirdness. Though when someone let me drive their tri-motor Lucid Air, it was about 3 minutes at an industrial park before they needed to be let out to heave. That setup allows for some really crazy angles through corners.
Tesla Model Ses historically were weirdly damped, and I could get people queasy within 2 minutes on an “open course”, and that can’t take angles like the Lucid.
I’m not someone who ever has done launch control because there’s no point to it other than as a “party piece”, but no ICE car will phase me. BEVs? I feel yucky.
My wife gets carsick if she turns around or looks at her phone when riding in my car but not when riding in the truck
Other than basic carsickness as a passenger, some oddballs:
An airport taxi in Detroit that was an incredibly beat up, high mile minivan with a huge exhaust leak that just about made me pass out on the ride.
Driving my old Jeep last winter for the first time in a few months, and realizing that a mouse had gotten into and pissed in the heater core once things heated up. I had to turn off the heat and roll down the window, and still got a headache and sore throat. This was followed up with more more occasional mouse piss smell and headaches (only the driver, not passengers) even after flushing the heater core with vinegar, until I finally recently figured out there was more in the headliner right above the driver’s seat, and the window shade.
0-60 in the 4 second range can make me a bit nauseous even as a driver.
I get carsick, if I don’t look out the windows (so no reading or phone as a passenger.) My carsick is a dizzy headache though, never nausea. I hate being dizzy. I also can get seasick on long period waves, ocean typically, lakes and rivers are fine, big boats are worse than little ones.
Here’s the strange one, though – many video games also get me, and this is one is fast acting. This is the worst for me, because I love playing video games, but pretty much can’t now. The first time I noticed it was with Mario Bros on Super NES, and it took an hour of playing to manifest. It has something to do with the background moving at different speeds, and first person shooters are the worst. I can sometimes play in 3rd person mode (Skyrim worked for me this way.) I stay away from them, but tried a newer GTA (because it was a free download) and I made it 30 seconds before I got the full effect, which mean laying down with my eyes closed for more than an hour to reset.
Wife gets very car sick from “New Car Smell”. We assume it’s off-gasing from vinyl, plastics and adhesives inside any brand new car. No problems in any car about 2-3 years out. Have not been able to buy a brand new car since the 80’s 🙁
Chemical sensitivity is certainly a thing. My wife isn’t as bad, but a new car needs to sit out in the sun with windows open for a few weeks or more so it doesn’t make her sick from the off-gassing.
Was anyone else expecting this to be a discussion of Mold in cars, since it’s Mercedes?
Yeah, I can’t read in a car without getting sick in about 3-4 minutes, so I usually choose to drive.
Also, the wife won’t drive when I’m in the car because she feels I criticize her driving. Probably because I ask her to use the cruise control, because yeah, she can’t maintain a constant speed either, and it’s always accelerating and decelerating. That’s a big reason I got her a PHEV, so at least it’s charging the battery. But it backfired because she leaves it in a mode with regen rather than coast when she lets off the throttle, so I swear it’s worse than a gas vehicle.
My wife is the opposite, she likes to use cruise all the time…on roads you cannot maintain a steady speed…there’s probably a big dent in the passenger floorboard where I’ve tensed up as the car accelerates toward the red light.
Both she and her twin brother get car sick easily.
My mom was an Avon Lady in the 80s and had a blue ’83 Camry (5 spd manual! Crank windows! No a/c). She had Avon products in the car frequently and that smell just sort of stayed in the car. On hot days, I would get nauseated from the smell. I did vomit a few times from it, including all over our city map book that I would look at while we were driving around. She kept that map book for several years after, with a couple wrinkly pages in the middle.
I borrowed a coworker’s Ioniq5, he talked about how his kid got sick on the way to school while he was taking some fast turns on a narrow road. After that he leaves the car in eco mode.
I floored it getting onto the highway and made myself nauseous. 4.5 second 0-60 is serious business and I’m not sure I want to try that in a car that would do <4 seconds. Previously my fastest was ~9 seconds.
Oh, I’ve definitely had these experiences. I had a rental car (I think it was a Kia-I blocked this out of my head years ago) where the heart line of the car felt way way too high for me, in that car, for my body (6’6). Every time I took a corner at speed, I felt my stomach going up into my throat. The whole thing was the worst experience.
Also riding in the back seat. Any backseat. Any time. I go green.
Do not hotbox in a Plymouth Laser. Especially don’t do it while drinking Miller Genuine Draft.
High school was, uh, a time. I wasn’t driving, for the record.
I want to vomit each time I see a Hyundai Kona. Does that count?
I am fortunate that I have never been motion sick outside of carnival rides designed to make you motion sick. Unfortunately, my wife and kids get motion sick all the time for almost any reason (it doesn’t matter the car, seating postion, or road conditions), so we always keep a collection of barf bags in the car.
I don’t think it’s the most ill I’ve been while in a car, but the most annoyed I’ve been at my sickness was when I once took an Uber ride in a Model 3 that I presume was fitted with some sports suspension package, because ride quality resembled an SN95 on eBay coilovers more than it did any of a Model 3’s competitors. On top of pointlessly terrible ride quality, it was being driven in 1-pedal mode by someone who pulses the pedal to drive, much like your wife, meaning it was constantly swinging from ludicrous acceleration to ludicrous regen.
Despite a day of connecting flights, that 40-minute drive home felt like the longest part of the trip.
Two different events always make me think of “car sick”:
I would get motion sick as a child and throw up like clockwork at the same place on the way to visit relatives. One trip we were all piled into the wagon and I was riding in the way back baking in the sun when I knew it was going to happen. I panicked and tried to let my parents know, but in my panic, I leaned over one of my brothers sitting in the back seat with the window open and just managed to get my face out into the wind when it all came up. The aerodynamics of a mid 80s cavalier wagon were not kind to anyone in that situation.
Second was my younger brother off at college calling me about how his Honda Fit smelled bad and asking how to get the smell out. He had been in charge of a big BBQ and had picked up all the food for it. As he was on the phone with me, he lifted the little flap behind the back seats in the hatch and found all the pork juice had leaked out of the meat and into the area behind the seats and sat there in the summer heat for several days. All I got was the sound of him vomiting and all he heard was my rolling laughter over the phone. I took 5 hours to clean up his interior.
I have never been motion sick in my life – not in cars, not in planes, and not on boats even though I was in 5’+ waves on a 30-foot boat many times during my childhood (my parents were avid boaters on the great lakes and sometimes you have to get back to your home marina to get back to work the next day). I can read, look at a screen, whatever, regardless of what the vehicle I’m in is doing.
I absolutely thank my lucky stars this is the case. Motion sickness seems like one of the most miserable things a person can experience on a regular basis.
Wasn’t a car, but an airplane.
I don’t often get motion sick. We had a Gulfstream G550 in the fleet that we had just inherited that was still in standard configuration (we hadn’t yet turned it into the experimental test bed that it is today). All 3 pilots were relatively fresh out of type-rating training and needed a currency flight. A quick way to maintain currency (3 takeoffs and landings) when you don’t fly everyday is touch and go’s.
Fast forward to my flight. I am in the back of the aircraft in those lovely recliners, just enjoying life. We take off, and the dang plane shoots off like a rocket. Dang near vertical. It was impressive. Then we got to cruising altitude and it was NICE. I can see why billionaires and CEOs ride in these things.
and then they took off the autopilot.
We hit turbulence descending into Roswell, NM and it wasn’t normal turbulence; the aircraft rocked up and down like a boat. We then did high performance turns and landed hard and heavy (I think I lost 1″ off my height) and then throttled back which shot my into my seat. Back to the turbulence.
After the second OF EIGHT touch and go’s, I start to feel a bit green. I frantically text my wife (who gets motion sick easily) on what to do, and she said to find the horizon. I look towards the cockpit through the windows and see the boat motion. Nope. Y’all, they were out of sick bags, to make things even worse.
Luckily, I barely kept my breakfast inside, but it was almost a disaster. I didn’t want to be the first one to ruin the luxurious carpets in the department’s new toy. That would have been an even worse reputation than when I ran the department out of coffee once.
We rode in an Uber piloted by a guy who obviously smoked actual cigarettes in the car every second there wasn’t a passenger. I was queasy and headachy inside of a minute. Luckily it was a very short trip to the airport.
Every time I go to New York City. I have to make sure I take Dramamine close enough to my flight that it’s still working for the ride into the city. I don’t think I’ve ever had a cab or Uber that didn’t shake me to the point of illness unless I drugged myself up.
The one time I made the mistake of not taking enough Dramamine, a driver bringing me to the city made me sick enough I had to ask him to pull over on the highway. A random person actually stopped and gave me water. I felt bad and I think the driver felt really bad because he eased up a lot on the aggressive driving – I feel like New York cab/Uber drivers can’t take it easy on passengers as they are more likely to get yelled at for being slow than taking it fast.
Lesson learned. I always medicate for New York trips, even if I’m going to be a drowsy mess at work.
This is why I walk or take the subway in NYC. It’s honestly faster, and somehow less scary most of the time.