Suddenly the whole garden went black.
The music stopped. The lights went out. Everyone just stood – still.
Sadness filled the air. The wedding celebration had to end. Nobody could see anything.
“I thought, ‘Oh, crap.’ But then we heard a generator running across the street, “said groom Vetrivel Chandrasekaran, 31, a mechanical engineer from Farmington Hills. “And that friend, Harish, said, ‘Yo. I have an F-150. I can just plug it in.’ I said, ‘Wait, this could actually work?’ ”
On this weekday evening around 10 a.m. in August, after a heavy rain shower had already delayed reception by almost two hours, the following happened:
“This F-150 connector saved the day,” said Chandrasekaran, who also celebrated his birthday on the night of August 11th.
They connected power cables for tent lights, music and a huge sound system with speakers, amplifiers and microphones. The truck itself had four sockets, but several items were plugged into socket strips and these were plugged into the truck.
“It was amazing,” said the bride, Rachna Nanda Kumar, a data scientist from Tulsa, Oklahoma, 26. “Everyone was just getting into their groove and with the help of the F-150 the party lasted until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m.”
While the averted disaster left the bridal shower stunned, the F-150 owners who worked at Ford only smiled. Because they knew the capabilities of the 2021 F-150 hybrid pickup with a built-in generator would save the day.
The wedding guests had used the sockets in the cargo area just days earlier to power some appliances and tools during a power outage at their Royal Oak home.
Everyone knows it’s nice to have friends who own pickups to move furniture and pull stranded vehicles out of snowdrifts. This has taken the pickup’s intervention to a new level.
“It was such an abrupt thing. We thought it might be a breaker,” said Harish Thiruvengadam, 35, a mechanical engineer at Ford. “The groom was ready to end the night. There was no other option. Then I remembered the PowerBoost. I backed up on the lawn, took the cords and stretched them across the lawn and, oh my god. Nobody could believe there were sockets in the back of the truck. They thought it was a generator, but it wasn’t a loud one Hear noise. “
The truck, he said, was the hero.
“People came by to ask questions,” said Thiruvengadam. “A lot of people there worked for the auto industry and there were competitors and they were a little jealous of our truck. They worked for GM and Chrysler, but we – the Ford people – helped them. ”
His wife, Swetha Shailendra, 30, an advanced connected car engineer at Ford, said, “Everyone was so excited.
The bride drives a Nissan Sentra. The groom drives a Cadillac ATS-V.
They are not truck people.
But this isn’t the first time an F-150 has come to the rescue.
Back in February, Randy Jones, a retired refinery worker from the city of Katy, Texas and owner of a 2021 Ford F-150 Hybrid Truck with Pro Power on board, made headlines around the world after posting pictures of him using his pickup truck around his Bringing home electricity and helping neighbors during the blackout affecting millions in the Lone Star State.
These newlyweds have lived a life full of unexpected twists and turns.
You met in December. A mutual family friend in India knew both young adults were in the United States and offered to introduce themselves. Numbers were exchanged.
“We actually met through our parents,” said the groom. “I was 31 and not married. Mom was like, it’s COVID. You will not meet anyone. At least try to talk to her. “
They decided to get married just 3 or 4 weeks before the wedding after traveling back and forth between Michigan and Oklahoma, where Kumar lived – cooking and watching Netflix and hiking.
Thought of a fall or winter wedding, the couple really didn’t want to plan a big affair amid a pandemic and just decided to get married at the Rochester Hills courthouse and then have a party in the groom’s back yard.
“I think COVID has helped both of us meet very often and get to know each other really well in a short amount of time,” said the bride. “We had to work from home and therefore had to travel a lot. It was a bit questionable with the parents because they could not enter from India. They had to stay in Mexico for two weeks. And they only arrived a day before the wedding. They made it just in time. “
Family members could not fly direct from India to the US due to COVID restrictions and then had to stay in Mexico according to local pandemic protocol, Chandrasekaran said.
The first night of the marriage was, well, spent without electricity. And the bride hopped back on a plane on Saturday to work for an oil and gas company that switched back to the office from working remotely.
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Your honeymoon? This has been put on hold for the time being.
Life is simple, well, busy. They just didn’t have time to plan anything.
“It was all kind of a roller coaster ride. The wedding morning went smoothly. The afternoon was better than expected. The evening was closing due to the storm (expletive). In the end, everything kind of turned out fine,” said Chandrasekaran. “We’ll be making the long distance calls for a while until we can figure it all out. I can hardly wait until we are permanently under one roof.
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Contact Phoebe Wall Howard at 313-618-1034 or similarR. phoward@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @phoebesaid. Read more on ford and sign up for ours Auto newsletter.
