Car Weasels Attack!

The stone marten (Martes foina), also sometimes called the beech marten or white-breasted marten, is a member of the weasel family (Mustelidae). It is found all over Europe and Central Asia, from the Iberian Peninsula all the way to Mongolia and China. The stone marten's diet includes small mammals and birds, insects, worms, fruits and berries, and my brother-in-law's car.

Let me explain. Martens don't build burrows or nests of their own, but rather will make their home in whatever warm, secure place they can find. A common phenomenon in Germany (where my brother-in-law lives) and elsewhere in Central Europe is car damage caused by martens. They like to climb up into the warm, dry engine compartment to spend the night. While they are there, they chew on rubber hoses and cables which, for whatever reason, they find attractive. On top of that, they are highly territorial, so if they happen to detect the scent of a different marten in the engine compartment, they will try to destroy anything that has the scent on it. The German Insurance Association reports that in 2024, car insurance companies received reports of damage on around a quarter of a million cars, at a cost of around €157 million, or around €620 per incident on average.

My brother-in-law lives at the edge of a village that was built on former vineyards that were rezoned for housing construction. It's a rural area, and there are still vineyards directly across the street from his house. He used to park his car on the street since his wife's car was occupying the their one-car garage. Their proximity to nature also means proximity to various critters, including martens, with which he fought a running battle for some time, with multiple trips to the repair shop.

The Dreaded Car Weasel

At one point he showed me a contraption he had built that was a grid of wires strung in a wooden frame, which he would shove under the engine compartment whenever he parked in his usual outside spot. It seems that martens find it unpleasant to walk on such a thing, and I think that finally solved the problem. Other solutions include things like spraying aromatic substances that the martens don't like in the engine compartment (here's one), or the practical application of German Engineering by installing a high-tech Marderabwehrgerät such as the one manufactured by these guys.

For much of the time that I myself lived in Germany, I never had this problem, since I lived in a larger city and parked my car on an urban street or in a parking garage, where it was pretty unlikely that such an animal would ever show up. Since moving back to the US around the turn of the millennium, I could take comfort in the fact that one of the problems that we don't have here is car weasels. Until…

A couple of weeks ago my wife asked me to see if I could figure out what was going on with her car, which she said was displaying a whole litany of different error messages on the dashboard after she started it. Huh? Sure enough, it started right up, but the power steering wasn't working, and the dashboard display was showing a power steering error message. Then it showed an error message for the anti-lock brake system. And then one for something else, and then something else, and something else. Aargh!

In the analog world of my teens and twenties I diagnosed and fixed my own cars. In our more modern era that's not really feasible. Everything has some electronic component and requires some expensive special tool or other. Engine compartments are crammed so full of stuff that it's usually a massively time-consuming effort just to get to whatever the part is that needs to be replaced. I've still done things in recent years like replacing the motorized mechanism that opens and closes the sliding doors on my Toyota minivan; I had to spend practically the whole day disassembling and then reassembling half the car to do it, but at least I was only out the $400 for the motor-and-cable assembly and not the couple of thousand dollars it would have cost to have the shop do it each time. But for the most part when something breaks I take it to the repair shop, resigned to the fact that I am about to spend at least $800 to fix the problem. (It seems like anything that goes wrong on one of my cars, no matter how trivial, costs a minimum of $800 to fix.)

I started searching online for possible causes of these particular symptoms on a 2017 Honda Civic. I suspected from the beginning that it must be an electrical problem of some sort, since a look under the hood didn't turn up anything that was obviously broken or leaking or otherwise indicative of a problem of a more mechanical nature. The Internet told me that my symptoms could be caused by a weak battery, but that battery isn't that old and the car started up without any problem. It advised me to check the fuses that protect the power steering system and various other things, but they all looked fine.

Ominously, one possibility that kept coming up as I searched was damage to the wiring harness caused by rodents. It seems that the wiring on that car is wrapped in a soy-based insulation that mice, rats, squirrels and others find quite tasty. There were claims that Honda even sells a special tape to wrap around the wiring, rendering it unpleasant to chew on. Had the curse of car weasels followed me to the New World?

To make a long story short: I had the car towed to the dealer, they said yes, it looks like rodents chewed through the wiring harness and it would need to be replaced. The guy handling my work order had never heard of the rodent tape, but looked it up in their system and discovered that such a thing does in fact exist, so for an extra $100 out of the $450 or so that this little adventure ultimately cost, I got that too. At least it wasn't $800 for once.