This Car was Allergic to Vanilla Ice-Cream

Cody McLain
2 min readMay 21, 2019

A story that originated in the early 70’s details a time that somebody submitted a complaint to Pontiac. It was a tradition in his family to buy ice-cream for his family after dinner each night, but he was having problems starting his car after buying a certain type of ice cream.

The man had recently purchased the new car and hasn’t had issues with the car starting on any of his other trips. Regardless, every-time he bought vanilla ice-cream, the car wouldn’t start. He knew this sounded silly but was adamant that the car had no problems starting if he bought any other flavor in the store.

The president of Pontiac was understandably skeptical about the letter, but nonetheless sent an engineer to check it out anyway.

They agreed to meet one night after dinner, and the two hopped into the car to drive and pick up the ice-cream. It happened to be vanilla that night, and sure enough, after they came back, the car wouldn’t start.

The Engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, they got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start.

The engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that the man’s car was allergic to vanilla ice-cream. He arranged to continue his…

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Cody McLain

Founder of $12m SupportNinja, Author of From Foster Care to Millionaire book, Host of MindHack.com Podcast