What Weird Ways Have Cars Made You Physically Sick?

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?