In addition to being a Question Of The Day, consider this post a warning: do not park your car for any extended period on an unpaved surface (if you can help it). Having to make it to Indianapolis for an important appointment and not wanting to risk getting a flat on my Civic’s now-leaking tires, I took my partner’s Mini, which we generally do not drive. After a day’s worth of use, this is what I found in the doorjamb: hundreds–possibly thousands–of ants, teaming over their eggs on the scuff plate and running frantically up and down A-pillar. This, mind you, is what’s happened to a well-finished, new-ish car after about two months of being parked on a weedy gravel driveway.
Pictures don’t do the ants I found this weekend justice. It was more disgusting than that still image captured and spraying down the door jamb multiple times has only partially solved the issue. But I’m sure many of you have experienced far worse; from rabid raccoons, to rats, wasps and even feral cats, cars make a nice, relatively dry space in which to nest. The Honda pictured here might be an extreme example, but wires, seat padding and sound insulation are all excellent materials out of which nests can be constructed. And as an online publication which celebrates barn and field finds, DIY repair and trips to the junkyard, I’m sure most of our readers have a story to tell. Which vermin infestation has most struck–or even scarred–you?
In Texas, mud dauber wasps have a tricky habit of building their mud nests in cool, dry, shaded places. After leaving my Pathfinder in a covered, concrete spot on my grandparents’ property for a month, one enterprising wasp filled my A/C condensate drain tube with mud. Eventually this caused my car to mysteriously smell like wet socks, and with a spirited left turn one day, it spilled a pint of dusty wet-sock water all over my passenger’s feet.
Years ago I parked my then 2 year old white VW GTI under a big shady tree in Lynden, Washington…..came back later and whole car was covered in tiny bright green bugs that had fallen out of the tree. They were kind of sticky too but a lot of them couldn’t hold on on the freeway drive back to Vancouver, but still had to take it down to the local spray wash and wash it about 5 times!
I once had a Corvair convertible, which I stored in the garage during the winter. Apparently I failed to notice a broken window in the garage one year, and when I put the top down that spring, I saw chewed stuffing on the rear seat – evidence of mice.
Cleaned it up and didn’t think much more of it until I was about a block from my home, and saw a mouse in the rearview mirror, scrambling across the rear deck to get away from the engine noise that was adjacent to his home in the convertible top well…
Down in San Diego, one winter a local field mouse was storing palm nuts in both my Moto Guzzi (down between the V of the engine, where they were impossible to remove) and in my Ferrari’s engine compartment. And they were both in a closed garage!
What in gods name is that last picture of?
When I worked at car dealer once, there was new car that had a huge wasps nest built behind the mirror glass on the drivers door. Once the car was sold and we brought it into the wash bay to spray it down, the little nasties flew out in an enraged frenzy and started stinging everybody. Most of everyone went screaming out of the washbay in panic, except for the few vigilant ones who were armed with the pressure washers.
A yellow jacket’s nest. It’s real.
That is what nightmares are made of!
That would be worth violating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, just to make sure they’re all dead.
Why yes, I have a wasp phobia…
Makes two of us.
Nowhere near these horror stories, but one year mice had built a nest under the back seat of my 60 Imperial while it was in winter storage.
Bounce dryer sheets and Irish spring soap ,that were both supposed to be rodent deterrents were not.
My saving grace is that the little vermin were so hungry they actually tried to eat the bar soap ,which killed them before any major damage could be done.
For a period of two years I had my ’77 Monza parked at an outdoor storage yard in El Segundo, Ca. I worked on it off and on for the first year and a half with no problems, but the last six months I kept getting attacked and stung by wasps whenever I’d open the hood.
Turns out that they had built a nest between the driver’s side fender and door. It was stuck the inside front flange of the door. After borrowing a can of bug spray from the yard’s manager, I permanently cancelled the little bastards’ lease.
That Monza now sits in my parents’ garage, buried under gardening tools and boxes of crap.
not my car- 1966 lincoln- possum
another pic
Looks like a mean little bastid!
last one
I had a Volvo 940SE that got an ant problem as well – what an enormous pain. My mechanic parked it on an unpaved part of his lot in the rain, that’s where it all started. The ants found some old sugary gunk under the back seat and when I picked up the car it was full of the buggers. It took me 3 weeks to get them all out from inside and out of the car. Watching them crawl over the dashboard and down the console on their way to the back was particularly distracting.
In Central New York Wasps love to build nests in the front fenders of vehicles, every bloody Summer and they even built nests behind the side view mirrors. My solution was to drive a few miles down the road, pull over, and either slam the doors shut a few times or if the vehicle had it move the power mirrors then drive off. Whacking the fenders with a newspaper, jumping in, and driving off was another trick. On hot days I would open the windows on my Voyager and open the tailgate to keep the vehicle cooler. I go to shut the tailgate about 12 hours later and there is a 3-5 Wasp nest on the tailgate’s plastic trim.
Back in the 70s and/or 80s Mama had a Cat that always slept on top of the air filter housing which was on top of the engine in her 70s Chevy C/10. The first time starting the truck the Cat was fine, but it and Mama were scared pretty good. After that Mama would just whack the hood or something and make sure the cat was gone before driving off.
The new Alfa 4C headlights are getting a bit of press because the lights are clustered like the holes on a wasps nest. Apparently management are umming and ahing about whether to use them on the production model. Trypophobia is the human aversion to such manifestations.
This guy hitched a ride with us yesterday
My minivan was hosting a bunch of ants during a boyscout trip. I had to poison them.
My wife’s Contour had 2 situations. Ground squirrels were trying to make a nest and brought in maple seeds. They were making home on top of the transaxle and they also deposited some of the maple seeds on the header. I tell you: there is a distinct difference in the aroma of French Roast and header roasted maple seeds.
Situation 2: My wife comes into the house and I notice a smell. I don’t want to say anything…….Next day, same thing. I don’t drive her car often, but I opened the door and I recognized that smell. My wife and the interior of that reasonably clean car smelled the same and it was not Chanel #5. It demanded action! Urgently! The whole family’s social status was on the line!
I found evidence of the presence of mice in the trunk, but I did not find any mice. I pulled the rear bench out and hit the mother load: some fat and happy maggots were feasting on 4 or 5 baby mice bodies!!!!!
Maybe 2 weeks ago my wife was out of town and the car was stationary for a few days. That was long enough for the the mother mouse to enter the car through the trunk vent behind the quarter panel, find a hole between trunk and cabin and deliver her litter under the rear seat! When my wife returned she unknowingly separated the babies from the mother when she used her car going to work.
It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. I pulled the carpet back removed the contaminated padding, washed everything as good as I could and applied copious amounts of Febreeze. The Febreeze almost won after multiple applications. I can still notice a little bit after 5 years. But at least I don’t have to hold my nose when she comes home.
Since then I use moth balls for prevention.
I can’t believe I published this!
Jesus christ, those are some horror stories!! Worst I’ve ever gotten were some wasps behind the mirrors like Teddy mentioned.
Two winters in a row, mice managed to squeeze through a 1/2″ drain hole and built a nest in the cowl of my New Beetle (Herbie), using the chewed-up cabin air filter for litter. The first time I ran the a/c (which draws air through this area) the next Spring, the mouse urine aroma was overpowering. It required disassembling the dash, thorough cleaning and heavy applications of air freshener to mostly obscure the odoriferousness.
1967 Mustang, parked outside on asphalt, rarely driven in the winter – covered with a four seasons car cover and lashed down with ratchet straps to keep the cover from moving. Filled the cabin (and trunk) with cheap/nasty/stinky dryer sheets. It did work and didn’t find any evidence of mice in the cabin or trunk after winter was up. However when I raised the hood there were gnawed on pinion nuts (close relative of the pine nut) piled up on the intake manifold. Fortunately the critters had not chewed the wires.
I had a wonderful rodent experience about a two years ago. My wife and I were on our way to a business meeting in Richmond when we smelled gas. I assumed it was someone else, but it got really strong in a hurry. I stopped and look out and there was a stream behind the car. I had left Vancouver with a full tank of gas and inside 10 km, a good ten litres had sprayed out.
I am very picky who works on my car and like a total idiot, I didn’t call a tow truck. I drove it to my mechanic and promptly deposited $50 worth of gas on the road, which is what the tow would have cost. The chance of incinerating my dear wife, dog and myself would been a lot lower, too.
Vancouver is the Greenwashing capital of the universe, and we are now mandated to put kitchen scraps in mega stinky compost bins, which attract rats like bears to honey. To combat the rat explosion (it never gets cold enough to kill them here) warfrin traps are all over the place. Rats who eat it get an intense thirst and light sensitivity. They just love confined, dark places with pipes in them, like what comes out of a fuel tank. They know there is liquid in the pipes and they are going crazy with thirst.
The rat got the main fuel line on my car. There were huge tooth marks on it. My guys (and they are excellent, mail me if you want their name) got the fuel line replaced without dropping the tank, which saved a lot of money. We left the work order open to see if an evap line was also damaged. A week later the check engine light was on again and we found a damaged evap line. Total bill was $200 in parts and the rest labour, fees and taxes of $600. It put an insurance claim on it with a $200 deductible.
According my my shop, rodent damage is really on the upswing due to loads of rodent food all over the place and loads of poison to kill them!
Another problem is animals that feed on the rats are also being poisoned. I have heard that licorice will kill rats.
Here in Tucson, we have to watch out for pack rats. Not hoarding humans, but native rodents. We had had to park one of our cars outside for a while, and pack rats found the engine. We had no idea they had invaded until the car wouldn’t start one day. We found sections of cholla cactus on top of the engine. It cost hundreds of dollars to fix the electrical damage the stinkers had done. In more recent years, pack rats invaded the home air conditioning system’s compressor/condenser unit, making repeated meals of the wiring. We had to repair wiring, cover it with metallic tape, and put in various indigestible barriers like stainless steel wool; finally, we had to remove a tree that was shading the air conditioner. No more pack rats.
The only other thing I’ve ever seen was that a bunch of spider eggs hatched one time in one of our cars. Fortunately, none of them made it to maturity; just as well, because I think they were black widows….
I had a couple of geckos take up residence in my HiLux cab- haven’t seen them for a while or heard them barking so I’m assuming they left for more comfortable digs.
My brother did some mechanic duty for a motocross racer,who carried his bikes in a Ford Transit box van.The van was also used by the racer’s parents to sell plants on a market stall during the week and often had slugs in the back.Eww,disgusting creatures
Theres a good sized colony of spiders in the mirrors of my Citroen leave it parked a few days and the webs grow alarmingly with winter setting they have calmed down for now though.
I read about a Ford Falcon that a restorer found a Black Widow inside the dash.Don’t know if it was an American or Australian Falcon though.
If it was Australian it would be a Red Back. I have to carry insecticide for work as many of the petrol pumps I repair are full of them. Strangely they don’t seem to be put off by the noise, vibration and petrol fumes,but they get good meals from the insects attracted by the lighting at night!
Brings back memories of one spring when I decided to kick over the ’30 Indian 101 Scout after sitting all winter. Normally, that’s not a difficult job because the old vehicles are nowhere near as touchy as something modern after sitting un-run for four months.
Primed it up, and dropped on the kicker. Of course, it started first kick (I knew that bike well). To my surprise, a mouse nest . . . . . and mouse . . . . . . came flying out of the exhaust pipe. Said mouse tumbled a few feet and made a beeline for the open garage door.
Probably moths in his van too.
I was under the hood of my parts-car 626 yesterday and found a neat little pile of chewed up hickory nuts and mouse droppings on and around the valve cover. Might not have been the most ideal solution, but I put cardboard with a load of kitty litter underneath it and SOAKED the entire engine bay with PB Blaster.
A gigantic wolf spider. The spiders we get here in southwest Florida can be monsters. About 12-13 years ago, I pulled into a gas station to fill up my ’91 Mercury Cougar XR7. It was late at night and I was a good 10 miles from home. I glanced over and saw this hairy thing on my passenger door speaker, about the size if hand, outstretched thumb to pinky in length. Huge. I went around to open the door to kill it and it was gone, hiding in my car somewhere. I looked all over but could not see it and refused to start feeling around under the seats. Eventually I just had to drive it home-about 90mph with the interior lights on and my hand on the door latch, ready to jump out of a moving car if need be. This same car became infested with black widows when I parked it at my parent’s house after I went away to college. I also think it was haunted, like Christine, but that’s a story for another day.
Didn’t realize how fortunate I am until reading these comments. My worst was noticing something wrong with the throttle in my 93 Crown Vic. Opened the hood to find the engine compartment packed with black walnuts. I counted about 60 of them jammed into multiple engine crevices. It happened again in s couple of weeks, but not as many. Some poor squirrel was ill rewarded for all of his thrift and industry.
Does a Boa Constrictor qualify? My dad was a biology teacher and he would bring a 6′ boa constrictor to schools as part of a reptile education program. After one trip he could not find the boa; it had got out of the satchel bag he carried it in. We looked around our house and yard but there was no snake to be found
A couple of days later my mother was taking my brother, sister and I somewhere and she noticed that the speedometer read 80 miles per hour even though she was just cruising down city streets. She told my dad about it later that day, so he laid down on the floorboard and sure enough the snake was stretched out behind the dash of our 1975 Caprice Classic station wagon.
Mom, to say the least, was NOT happy.
The car could not be driven, no mechanic would go near it, and trying to pull the snake out would destroy the wiring of the dash since the very strong snake was wrapped throughout it. After a couple of days with no car and a profoundly unhappy wife my dad developed a very wise plan based on science: snakes are cold blooded and need external sources of heat. That evening dad parked the car outside, opened all the windows, and put an electric heating pad on the passenger side floorboard. Over the course of the night as the car got cool the snake slitherd out of the dash and coiled up on the nice warm heating pad. The next day dad just reached in, grabbed the snake (this takes a lot of practice) and stuffed him back in the satchel.
Mom took a little longer to warm back up.
One afternoon a tree frog crawled up from the footwell onto the instrument panel of my ’73 Galaxie and settled down on the ‘100’ while we were on the highway. I stopped at a convenience store and bought a cup of water with a cap to keep it cool and hydrated until we got home, then released it onto an oak tree.
Back in ’99 I bought a nice clean low mileage ’89 Sedan DeVille that had been sitting for a time due to a minor deer hit. Fixed the damage (all it needed was a right fender and some paint work) and started driving it. Well, the first time I used the heat I almost hurled, seems the heater box made a nice mouse condo complex/urinal. It was NOT fun cleaning that mess up…
great post.
– mom’s 92 camry became home to mice, storing the birdseed she put out every morning. She used remote starter, car caught on fire – almost took out garage.
– my new cadillac catera (i know, i know) parked in city lot, hot day. Start up, door open letting AC kick on, enormous rat climbs off tire and right over my leg…must have been in engine compartment.
Last, not a car, every year i leave my rowboat upside down in the field for winter. Last year, flip over, and it is a teaming disgusting nest of garden snakes.
This year, i kid you not, a family of skunks. I can still run the 100 yd dash, turns out.
Because I had the DougD 63 VW project right down to bare metal, I did fish 3 or 4 mouse nests out of the doors, headliner, etc.
When I store it in the winter now I leave a peanut butter baited snap trap, but there have been no takers.
My mom didn’t drive her last car much for a while, she had some balance issues and she said she just didn’t think it would be a smart thing to do. Ok, no big deal. I drove her car to work a few times, probably once every 10 days or so. After a couple of months of this, I took her car to work, and on the way home, I decided to get it washed and to vacuum it, just to get the Vegas sand out of it. After it went through the wash, I took it home and fired up the shopvac. I was digging around under the front seat (bench) when I saw a Black Widow run out from under the passenger side. Well, I wasn’t surprised too much to see one, my old Beagle found them all the time, and usually got bit too. What did surprise me was when about a half dozen more came out and a couple of them crawled onto my hand! I admit it, after being bit on the face by a BW, I was kind of freaked out by them, so I went into panic mode and bailed out shaking my hands like a total nutjob. I got some gloves and really laid into vacuuming the car out really well, and I put some stuff on the floor of the car that the car detailing place recommended, and I never saw one again.
An aquaintance died in his car about 15 years ago while train watching, It was a heart attack. No shock, since he was about 60, and smoked about 3 packs a day from age 14. He practically lived in that car, so it was a real mess. The car was taken to the impound yard and then was taken somewhere to be cleaned and then sold. It was a few days after his death. They opened the hatch up and began to empty out all the fast food wrappers and other trash he had when suddenly, about a hundred or so mice began jumping out. The kid cleaning out the car freaked out and started screaming, and actually had to have oxygen he was so scared. The whole building rapidly became infested with mice and they finally had to have pros come in to get rid of them, as the employees/management’s attempts were too few and weak to work.
Yellow jackets got into the floor vents in the old Chevy C10. Pulled the lever under the dash on the freeway and a swarm flew out and the paper nest landed on my foot They were not happy and I wasn’t either. Once at an Audi dealership I worked for, a customers boa got into the dash in his Audi 5000. The wire harness had to be cut up to get the entangled snake out. I also have had wasps build nests between the door and A piller and had them come flying at me as I opened the door.
When I was 16 I had to move my Uncle’s 63 Chevy II, the floor was rusted out and as I was backing up a mouse ran up my leg. Lets just say that anything that was in my way in the yard was mowed down as I floored it. Had a hard time getting the patio set out of the back window.
Cockroaches ….thousands and thousands of them of all sizes..many baby ones..
I had an Audi 100CD smacked-up at the Royal Oak roundabout in the mid-90s..
a busted headlight and bent left guard, so i put it under a car cover for a couple of months.. decided to get it repaired and removed the cover ….HORROR ..there were about a million cockroaches covering every bit of the car’s exterior
this was in the damp, dark, wetness of Titirangi/Laingholm…. MY GOD!
I brushed enough off the door to get in and start it up… used the wipers to clear the screen..
…and drove off along Laingholm Drive distributing aerially thousands and thousands of
cockroaches as they blew away in the airstream…
took the car up to 120kmph to clear most of them off
Oh .. the lucky neighbourhood.. perhaps up to 300 houses on either side of the road were nicely supplied with a chirping horde of flying cockroaches of varying sizes landing in their front sections as they streamed away from the car as the speed increased…
am i a bastard, or what…. lol
…later the local newspaper reported an infestation of roaches in that area of the neighbourhood and pest exterminators were called in by the local council to control ‘the outbreak’
apparently they were australian cockroaches, a hitherto rarely seen type of BIG dark brown scary-looking buggers …i think i must have ‘transported’ them from Pauanui where they had entered the country in a shipment of logs (had a summer home there which had these things living in the sandy ground there)
anyway now Auckland City shares the problem (along with Pauanui) courtesy of yours’ truly, me
🙂
my wife started calling me “plague” instead of ‘Craig’ and certain activities were denied to me for quite some time
wherever the car was parked say for half an hour there were at least a dozen or so cockroaches that emerged from panels and underbody openings and dropped down onto the road to scuttle away to begin their new lives in a fresh neighbourhood, for many months afterwards..
Ants, schmants. It doesn’t matter if you park your car in the grass or on a concrete driveway, if ants are living nearby (like in the cracks between the concrete driveway slabs) and they sense your car has some tasty morsels of food on it or in it, you’ll have some unwelcome driving partners on your trips.
I was getting repeated infestations of ants, and the best I could determine what attracted them was the dead bugs stuck in the car radiator. It’s not like I lived and ate in the car so that there was a steady supply of crumbs being created. The ants would die back in the winter and spring forth in the spring. Except for spraying them periodically, I was never able to cure the infestation.
I had parked my ’84 Camaro Z28 in my yard after I bought a new T-bird, but I liked to drive the Camaro on weekends when the weather was nice.
After the Camaro had sat for a while, being driven only intermittently, I noticed the A/C needed to be charged. So, one Saturday morning early, I jumped into the car and headed to the mechanic, which was about a 10-mile drive, give or take.
When I got there and explained what I needed done, the mechanic had me drive the car into the service bay and pop the hood. He raised the hood, and a possum head appeared beside the air cleaner next to the firewall. The possum looked around, kinda groggy from being so rudely disturbed by the early morning trip, clambered up out of the car, jumped down on the ground, and scurried into the woods behind the mechanic’s building.
I’m not sure where the possum was nesting, since there was not much room around the engine (it was a V8). When I first saw him he was close to one of the exhaust manifolds, and there were four belts in front which could have chewed him up if he got caught in them.
Last I saw of him, the possum didn’t seem worse for wear, but the mechanic was taken aback a little by my unwanted rider.