WACO, Tex. — Teresa Porter pulled up to the red light and turned to eyeball the crimson pickup truck to her right. Her silver fingernails gripped the steering wheel. Her foot sank hard into the brake, ready to pounce on the accelerator.
“I’ve proven that broke folks can drive electric cars,” Porter says. And she’s trying to spread that message across Texas, one combustion engine at a time. Porter’s electric prophecy is lonely work in this Republican bastion in the heart of Texas, where pickups reign and charging infrastructure is sparse. Some people laugh at her. “Haters,” she calls them. Many, particularly in the gear-head community, cling to their rumbling internal combustion engine, or ICE, vehicles.spike — she starts to win people over. A few months ago she held a sparsely attended EV show in Marlin, Tex.
In 2019, she spent $13,000 on her used 2016 Leaf, decorating it with a giant “electric” sticker on the side. Her mechanic husband, Ben Porter, paid $3,500 for a used Mitsubishi i-MiEV, a tiny jelly bean of a car that gets about 60 miles to a charge. The Porters, who got married at a car show, park their vehicles outside their house in the shade of an interstate highway, plugging them into cords that dangle out windows propped open with pool noodles.