Do rats eat cars?
Posted on 9th February 2025 at 11:56
Do rats really eat cars?
I’m a big fan of tradition and an orderly way of doing things, with me it’s not quite as bad as having OCD but ever, so slightly there, and that goes down to habits and what belongs with what, a good example, is that tomato ketchup goes with a toasted cheese sandwich. It’s simply got to be this way.
When I was in the fire service, every day at 11 o’clock was one of my favourite traditions or you could call it a habit, and that was, we all sat down to a cup of tea and a toasted cheese sandwich, with a great big dollop of tomato ketchup on it.
No matter what Station you were at or, for that matter, which Brigade, at eleven you knew exactly what you’d be doing, and you never questioned why, its how it is. And I do like the combination and please, don’t say that its got to be brown sauce or anything else to go with the toasty!
I’m not alone as a fan of tommy K, as a nation we slurp and munch our way through over 150 thousand tonnes of the stuff every year, and that’s like a trillion bottles worth, or some such number.
With that much finished product, what about all the waste that goes with it; the tomato skins, the pips and all the vine stalks, what do you do with all this waste? If you’re a clever person, you try to turn it into something useful and not for landfill and that’s what the clever people at Heinz have done, they’ve made bioplastics.
Or rather, in plain English, they’ve made their problem, your problem and this is why.
Do rats really eat cars? Yes they do!
A play on the immortal words from the film Jaws “We’re gonna need a bigger bin” comes to mind when you think about how much rubbish is produced; however, this waste material doesn't’t go to landfill, instead those clever people in white lab coats realised that this material can be recycled into something that’s called ‘bioplastic’. The waste skins and stalks can be made into a rigid, plastic like compound that is manufactured into body parts, wiring looms and other items like interior trim which is great news for Heinz and enables Ford to make green claims for recyclable cars.
I’m sure those clever people have the right intentions and would claim that they’re solving a problem that effects everyone, but I prefer to call it by its true name – and that’s “making my problem, your problem” and that’s exactly what it is. It’s now our problem because we’re basically manufacturing edible cars and true to form, rats and mice are eating their way through our precious vehicles. I’m seeing a lot of damage being done to vehicles and getting a lot of calls from people who have problems with rats eating their cars, or rather, if you look at it from another angle, eating Heinz’s factory waste.
Go back in time to 2014 and the Ford motor company were so pleased about their collaboration with Heinz, they released a news report which you can read here, they’ve basically said outright, we ‘ve made edible cars =
It comes down to the fact that we’re dealing with rats, which are extremely clever animals, and as they ‘learn’ that many of our cars and vans, instead of being manufactured from petroleum-based products, are in fact made from recycled sugar cane, soya beans, corn and tomatoes. Its taken just over ten years for rats and mice to realise that your car is nothing more than a tasty snack.
As we see more development of bioplastics because, after all its good for the planet right? We’ll see more attacks on cars and vans; I just spoke to someone who has a car which has been attacked by rats and his insurance company claim that each area is in fact a different claim and therefore subject to a new excess. Bioplastics are going to cost the motorist a substantial amount of money in repair bills due to rodent damage.
The remains of a Transit van - this was the pile of debris after a hungry rat had a go overnight
What can I do to protect my car?
But what can you do to protect your car from a rat attack? If you’re at buying a new car or van and you ask the salesman about the use of bioplastics in the vehicle, I doubt you’ll get anything in return other than a blank look, so don’t expect help there.
What you can do to protect your vehicle from these hungry rodents is the most obvious thing, and that’s to park it inside a secure garage, I know that many so called car garages are now smaller than the vehicle it was designed to house, but I went to a job in Maidenhead where a Porsche, had had its wiring loom eaten, the car was parked outside a double garage which was empty at the time. Sorry to offer up the obvious answer but there it is.
If you’re lucky and your car fits inside the garage, there will probably be an up and over door on the front, and when this doors closed there’s often a small gap between the bottom of the door and the floor; one way to know if there’s likely to be an issue is to use your measuring guide.
Your measuring guide? Look at your hand, either hand it doesn't matter which, your thumb fits in a hole the same size as a rat will use and your little fingers a mouse, so if you can get either of these through the gap, you’ve potentially got a problem.
The most simple and cost-effective solution, is to take a length of decking board, close the door and from the inside of the garage, offer the board up to the opening. You’ll probably need to trim the corners back to fit the door frame but with a few cuts here and there, you should get a nice tight fit that bumps up against the bottom of the garage door. Now fix this board to the floor and being tanalised timber you’ve got yourself between 10- and 15-years rodent protection for about £20.
There is another solution for those timber framed, open fronted covered areas and any unsecure garages in the form of a product called the Rat Mat, this is like an electric fence that surrounds the vehicle but in the form of electric floor tiles that you fix down and surround the parking bay. Once the car is parked inside the space, any rodents coming onto the surface of the mat get an electric shock which deters them from crossing.
The rat Mat is not the cheapest solution and at £1500 for a large sized grid but it’s still going to be cheaper than any garage repair bill and you’re saved the hassle of a break down, the vehicle hire and any recovery costs.
When you just don’t have the option to park a car inside, an alternative is an anti-rodent aerosol spray from a company called Lodi, they actually supply me with some of my chemicals so I’ve no doubt that this works well. You simply spray all of the cables and mounts with this and at under £40 for a tin it’s much more affordable, although you’ll need to respray these areas from time to time.
When you’re trying to protect parked vehicles outside, essentially the best way to do this is by preventing them from coming onto your property in the first place, and the best way for that is going to be by hiring the services of a professional pest control company. Now at this point, someone is going to mention the use of ultrasonic rodent repellents and how effective they are, and sorry, just like the clever people who got us into this place, they’re wrong.
One of the great urban myths of the 21st Century is like this: Mrs Brown / or my friend / or my mum, has been plagued by rats for years and despite her best efforts and the efforts of several pest companies, the only thing that worked were ultrasonic repellents and now the rats have disappeared for good. This is absolute utter rubbish, it’s just not true.
If these stories were in fact true, then I’d drive around in a flash car and wear a suit to work instead of driving my van and wearing workwear all day long. Ultrasound is simply nothing more than high frequency sound waves that we are unable to hear, and the theory behind this story, is that this sound is picked up by rats and mice and it causes them so much distress, that they run away from the source of this sound.
But sorry, that’s now how ultrasound works, being narrow wavelength it’s like a beam of sound that can be easily reflected back to the source which is why we have ultrasound devices in hospital, and this is how bats and dolphins find their food.
If you have one of these repellers in your house, it sends out a sound wave in the shape of a beam, just like a torch gives off light, so to be effective the rodent has to stand pretty much in front of the device to be affected by it. Putting one into a large void spave like a loft is doing nothing a part from wasting electricity, If you don’t believe me, type the following sentence into Google - do ultrasonic pest repellers work uk?
The reply you’ll get back is - No, ultrasonic pest repellers are not effective in the UK. They are considered a scam and are not recommended by researchers.
These are not my words but those of some properly clever people, who knows, maybe they should speak to the car manufacturers?
Taken in Reading on the Kings Road, rats living inside the engine bay. This vehicle had been left for months and the damage was considerable.
Tagged as: Rats and mice
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