Australia: Rodents destroy Newcastle family's luxury Land Rover; make nests inside the car

A Newcastle family was left aghast after a rat stowed and damaged their luxury four-wheel-drive Land Rover parked overnight as they took a trip to the Hunter Valley to celebrate a relative’s 90th birthday. The family incurred a total of $20,000 worth of damage. Luke Tilse had driven his expensive car to the family’s orchard at Moonan Flat in April, and in what can be called a nightmare, he noticed several holes appearing in the car’s thick rubber floor mats. The holes just got bigger and bigger and were made on the hardcore rubber mat, Tilse told US Express news. Although he did not see any [rodents], he just knew that they were there because little by little the car’s holes were getting eaten up.

According to Tilse, his car armrests were covered in bite marks and there were several nests inside the vehicle. The rats had also excessively littered and destroyed the leather on the console, as they lived inside the luxury car. After the New South Wales, Australia resident took his car to the dealership he was charged about $ 10,000 just for the examination. However, the total cost for the repairs reached $ 19,600. The rats had caused excessive damage under the dashboard of the car and the airbags were at the risk to explode due to the fluctuation in the electricity. It took the dealers two months to change all the damaged specialized parts of the car, with a lot of manpower and manual labour. 

Rodents lived under the car's carpet

The auto mechanic Garry van Dijk told the network that he had to take the whole car apart, to fix it. Basically, the whole interior was out of the vehicle,  the seats, the dashboard, the air conditioning unit, everything is separate on this car, he said. The repairer added that there was more than just one rodent living under the carpet while the family drove the car. They had chewed up the door trim, the seats, the armrests, the consoles, and during the servicing, the company recovered a huge amount of faeces from inside the vehicle. The rodents had dragged wet wipes around the dashboard to make nests. Although it wasn’t damaged. But the part had to be sterilized and cleaned, Dijk said.