Rodents devoured this man’s electric car, and nobody wants to cover the damage

When Samil Sanal started his electric car for a regular day of work as an Uber driver in February, all the lights on his dashboard began blinking.

“System failure,” the car said.

He would never have guessed what was going on under the bonnet of the €30,000 EV.

Deep in the entrails of Sanal's Kia e-Niro, an electric crossover, one or several rodents had gnawed away at big chunks of wiring, causing more than €5,000 in damage that neither the car's warranty nor his insurance will cover.

“Rodents made a picnic out of the Kia,” Emma Sanal, his wife, told Euronews Next.

The couple and their two children live near Lyon, France, in a house with a garden close to the Rhône River. Two older cars parked outside right next to the Kia were left unscathed, they said.

Mice or rats nesting in a warm vehicle is not a new phenomenon, and there’s no suggestion that they prefer EVs to traditional petrol or diesel cars. But car dealers and owners suspect new environmentally friendly materials used in auto parts may be attracting more wildlife than before.

A Google search for “rats ate my car wires” returns dozens of pages of results, from local news stories to forums where users trade tips to repel rodents.

Tesla’s forums also include a long thread of Model 3 owners complaining about rodent-related damage to soy-based insulation.

In the United States, several class-action lawsuits have been filed against other big carmakers in recent years, alleging that soy-based products were to blame for infestations of hungry animals.

These court cases were later dismissed. Back in Europe, the trade group representing auto part suppliers, CLEPA, says all materials go through testing and are designed to resist misuse by humans or animals - rodents included.

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