Perhaps the moral here is ‘don’t trust strange squirrels.’
I had to cheat the perspective a little bit in the panels where the guys are all crowded into the car, just because I wanted to get all their faces into each shot. I suppose you could also assume that another one of Chance’s hidden skills is that he’s also a talented contortionist. Yeah, let’s go with that….
I had a squirrel come up to me on a park bench and put its paw on my leg because it saw my feeding the pigeons. Another squirrel bit me on the thumb (didn’t break the skin, thank goodness) because I was feeding it unshelled acorns. Trust me, squirrels are aggressive critters and not to be trusted!
So, as long as they don’t leave the car, there shouldn’t be any problem. (There’s no electrical ground through the rubber tires.)
God dammit that’s not why cars are safe from lightning strikes!
Air is a great insulator, and the electricity just traveled through a mile of it. Why do you think that an inch of rubber is going to stop that kind of power? The reason cars are safe is because the metal frame is far more conductive than the juicy human center, so the lightning goes through the car and tires into the ground, without touching the people inside. The squirrel isn’t made to affect people (unless science changes the laws of electrodynamics); it’s made to fry any electrical systems in the car.
Either that and we’re all reading it wrong and the car’s zapping the squirrel.