Like your dad during his midlife crisis, this is happiest in your garage.

But it won’t be lifting weights and blasting Frampton Comes Alive! and smoking the worst weed north of Oaxaca. This Cobra unit will just be hanging out plugged into an AC outlet until it’s time to jump a battery, fill a tire, whatever, man, it’s cool. Need to blow up a raft by the pool? Tote this thing on out, brother. No hassle. No cord trailing dangerously through puddles.

Then plug it back in when you’re done. It’s not tied down by that cord. It just happens to be comfortable there.

It’s a lot harder to say what’ll happen if you keep it in a car trunk. Some reviews say it’ll lose its mellow. And its charge. And then fail you when you need it most. If you need a mobile roadside wingman, these reviewers say, buy something else or you’re gonna find yourself SOL. That’s one story.

The other story is that it’ll be just fine in your trunk. Cobra’s marketing says it holds a charge for three months, and some reviewers love it. (Weirdly, the good reviews all seem to be on Wal-Mart and the bad reviews on Amazon. We’ll let the sociologists sort that one out.)

So yeah, YMMV if you stow it in your car all the time. Maybe you’ll agree that “it sits and when you need it. its DOA”. Or maybe you’ll find that “it worked perfectly”.

All we know for sure is that pretty much anywhere you regularly keep a car parked - home, work, some third type of place we can’t think of right now - you should keep one of these things plugged in and ready to go. Dead battery? Flat tire? Sudden need for a handy AC or USB outlet? Just give this Cobra jumpstart a holler and he’ll fix you right up. Until then, he’s just gonna be hanging out in the garage.