Yahoo Autos Rats Have as Much of a Taste for Cars as We Do, but in a More Literal Sense
From the August 2018 issue
You know who enjoys the taste of a fine car? Rodents. Or maybe they don’t. That’s the weird question at the root of a series of class-action lawsuits filed over the last few years. The suits, most notably against Toyota and Honda, claim that the soy-based, eco-friendlier wire coverings in recent models are exceptionally delectable to rodents. For its part, Honda says there’s no proof that rats are more attracted to the newer wire coverings, or that they consume them at all, and, anyway, the formulations of various wire coverings come from a variety of suppliers and aren’t all the same and, you know, the case has no merit and so forth and so on. To my knowledge, no one has even considered asking the rats (or the tiny rats we call mice or the bushy-tailed rats known as squirrels, etc.) what exactly their taste is in wire coverings.
As anyone who has ever had a rat infestation over the last, oh, forever will know: They gnaw on stuff. They gnaw on all things all the time. Plastic, lead, cinder blocks, the fuselage of an SR-71 Blackbird, Mickey Rourke’s face . . . they’re not particularly picky about ingredients or preparation. A rat does this because its incisors never stop growing, and if it didn’t wear them down gnawing on your Honda, its teeth would continue to grow, in a spiral with an 86-degree angle, until the rat was unable to close its mouth or eat. Then it would die. But rats aren’t necessarily consuming all these things, either. They don’t necessarily enjoy it or have a craving for a particular wire.
As a human, I might prefer the flavor and mouthfeel of the soy-based coverings to that of the old petroleum-derived versions. But I have not eaten a car or any part of a car large and solid enough to require chewing. Further, I am not a participant in or the target of a class-action lawsuit, at least not one related to my eating habits. And while I’m guessing I might have gnawed on car bits at one time or another, my incisors do not continue to grow, unless we’re referring to growing increasingly coffee stained. It’s true that I have inhaled a fair number and variety of car-related molecules. And how many I’ve introduced into my system via osmosis, I don’t know. I’ve tried to limit, in particular, allowing brake fluid to mix with my internals, though, because, well, why in the hell does it feel warm to the touch when it is not actually warm? I hate that stuff.
But I digress. The closest I’ve ever come to consuming a car was in 2005, when I had the bright idea to combine two of my most persistent passions—cars and an endless stream of hot coffee—into one amazingly dunderheaded stunt. A Cadillac DTS of that era was of utterly no interest to a car enthusiast. But I did have loan of a DTS while working for a different car magazine, a magazine that had even less interest in a DTS than did Car and Driver. But the DTS had a new trick option: a heated-washer-fluid system called HotShot. Never heard of it? There’s a reason for that. At the push of a button, the system would send your washer fluid through a dedicated underhood heater and then fire 150-degree liquid onto the windshield to thermally annihilate ice. It was a good idea and actually worked pretty well.
But what if you drained the washer fluid (and thoroughly flushed the system with water), filled up the reservoir with coffee, then tapped into the washer line and ran some vinyl tubing from the system all the way up the A-pillar and into the vehicle through the driver’s-side window where it could be secured to a mug in the cupholder? That’s a bad idea.
But it’s a bad idea that works. Prepare yourself for eight-ounce bursts of steaming brown liquid shot, on demand, into the receptacle of your choice. I also tried firing it directly into my mouth, but as that receptacle accommodates only about 4.22 fluid ounces, it did not end well. Either way, the vinyl tubing and various unknown other adulterants in the system meant that the coffee was barely recognizable to my taste buds. Instead, it tasted like a strong astringent with top notes of Good God, Why Am I Such a Moron? HotShot didn’t last long. As it turns out, like the magazine I worked for at the time, HotShot was a good idea that was discontinued after it had started too many fires. There was some legal wrangling, in which I was not implicated.
Rats will consume another dead rat for sustenance if they must, but curiously they turn their noses up at a mouthful of capsaicin, the active compound in spicy chilies. Honda started selling capsaicin-impregnated polyvinyl-chloride adhesive tape in 2010 (more than five years before the first lawsuit was filed). The tape, featuring illustrations of a rat with a large X over its eyes, is to be wrapped around your car’s wires to ward off rats. A Japanese company named Teraoka makes the tape and notes, firmly yet politely, that you should not “put this tape on human skins” and “Please don’t put this tape into mouth, and please don’t lick this tape.” I bought a roll from a Honda parts distributor. And do you know who gave that roll a test lick? Not this guy. Not this time.
You Might Also Like
