Jason Mendelson was driving his Toyota Prius in the right lane of Interstate 64 near Richmond, Virginia, when a white pickup truck with two protruding smokestacks cut into the lane ahead.
After a few moments, the pickup spewed a torrent of black smoke that enveloped his small car. The pickup sped away. Mendelson didn't think much of the odd interaction until a few minutes later, when the pickup returned and again left him in a cloud of smoke.
"That's when I realized, 'Okay, this was on purpose,'" he said.
Indeed, he was the victim of a practice called "coal rolling" or "rolling coal," which if you're unfamiliar, is the equivalent of farting in someone's vehicular face.
Own a diesel pickup truck, and you can spend somewhere between several hundred to several thousand dollars on modifications that make the vehicle capable of belching towers of black smoke on command, all for the apparent pleasure of leaving fellow drivers or pedestrians choking on a cloud of soot.
Victims aren't usually chosen at random. Rather, coal rollers take particular delight in targeting drivers of green-friendly cars like the Toyota Prius, because rolling coal isn't always mere indiscriminate harassment, but a form of grassroots political protest against President Obama and perceived burdensome federal regulations.
Coal rollers take particular delight in targeting drivers of green-friendly cars like the Toyota Prius.
"I run into a lot of people that don't really like Obama at all," one coal-roller tells Slate, which detailed the practice at length. "If he's into the environment, if he's into this or that, we're not. I hear a lot of that. To get a single stack on my truck – that's my way of giving them the finger. You want clean air and a tiny carbon footprint? Well, screw you."...