The dead rat in my car

Sunday morning, as I was loading up stuff for our water park visit, I noticed a mess of black rubber bits behind the car. I quickly realized that they were from the rubber seal on the bottom of garage door. Something tried to eat its way out of the garage and failed. I've gotta see if I can find a replacement before the next hurricane, because we've never had any water intrusion on those doors, and I don't want to start now.

On Monday, something started to stink in the garage. It can get to be a hundred degrees in there when the morning sun is pounding on those doors. I just assumed that it was something in the garbage. Generally we don't produce enough garbage to be a problem, but now and then something makes it out there. I didn't think much of it, until Diana pointed out that we had not put anything in there yet for the week. We assumed that whatever ate the garage door died somewhere in the garage. If only it were that easy.

When Diana and I went out for lunch on Tuesday, I caught a whiff of the stink in a parking lot. I was pretty convinced at that point that the dead thing was in the car. Leaving it outside of the garage confirmed this. Gross. On the plus side, there isn't much under the hood of a Model Y. Once you take off the frunk liner, you'll see the radiator mounted diagonally under it, the heat pump and AC bits, the 12V battery, and if you have a dual motor, the front electric motor. There isn't much to the inside of an EV. I spent a good hour poking around, but couldn't find the dead thing. The one spot I couldn't easily see was on top of the scrape plate underneath, but removing some of those annoying plastic push pins under the bumper and a few bolts, I could get it loose enough to see all of it. Nothing there.

Two days went by, with the car in the driveway. I pulled out the stuff again today, and I could tell by the intensity of the smell that it was on the driver's side. Then, I just happened to notice some gray fur in a small gap between the frame, the washer fluid tank and a wire harness. I can't believe that I missed it after looking as much as I did. Worse yet, I know the thing was inches from my nose. No wonder I felt sick after looking the other day.

I couldn't easily remove the tank without removing the wiper arms and motor, and the arms annoyingly require a special tool, per the service manual. That's disappointing considering how easy everything else is to get to. Not that I'd try to service an EV, because the electrical bits scare me, but it's a relatively simple machine otherwise. What I could do is remove the feeding part of the tank, and then removing a screw and a nut, I could tilt the tank up enough to grab the rat with tongs. Well, I could with help.

To get leverage, I climbed in the compartment, standing on the aluminum cross-member so I could pull up on the tank in the space I had. Diana and her smaller hands, equipped with a nose plug and my favorite grilling tongs, reached in there and grabbed the bugger. It was in bad shape already, with much of the head and chest rotting. The tail and rest of its skin was still very whole, so I imagine it would have taken weeks for it to rot into oblivion. Gross. And no, I didn't take a photo of it. It's in my front lawn for the scavengers if you wanna go look.

I sprayed some bleach in there and have left it open to air out for awhile. On the plus side, it was never in a place that brought the smell inside, and it's a well-sealed cabin. Diana's newer model has the bioweapon defense mode with the gigantic filter, but even this one has a solid filtering mechanism, and the intake is away from where the critter was. Hopefully it dissipates enough to leave it in the garage tonight.