Driving around with a lit cigarette hanging out the window, and especially discarding lit smokes from your car is not only illegal, but during times of increased fire danger, like right now in California, is insane. darrelx has more to say has more to say from the firing line . My home town is a small US Forest Service base in the Sierra Nevada. (The base, alas, was closed in a budget-driven consolidation of districts on the Plumas National Forest. Challenge , never exactly a particularly bustling place save possibly during the Gold Rush, is going to seed with the departure of its major employer.) My father was a career USFS officer who was away from home at times for more than a month fighting fires. In an alternative universe, I'm not even here because the fire that trapped his crew on a fire when he was young didn't jump over them as happened here. He was a smoker, but you never saw him tossing butts out the window — he knew exactly what could happen.