So, it appears there’s some sort of beastie that has set up shop in our Corolla; there is a hole in the seat with stuffing scattered all over the place and some charming little turds.
What to do? Both our usual mechanic and exterminator have told us they don’t deal with animals/cars respectively. Should we just keep calling around?
Any advice on either dealing with the current situation or preventing future unpleasantness would be appreciated.
Oh, I feel your pain. I never had problems with my dear old car until this past year. Now it’s a battle. They leave their scent trails and no matter how carefully you clean your car, it’s impossible to eradicate the trails entirely. So the rodents return and return. I had my car professionally detailed and the guy did a fabulous job. It made no difference.
D-CON works for me. I leave blocks of it in the car and tucked into corners under the hood. They may come in, but the don’t stay long anymore.
Leaving the hood up will help keep them from making nests in the engine compartment, but it won’t stop them from making nests in your seats. Thankfully, my rodents appear to prefer the glove box. I now have nothing in my glove box and I leave it open when not using the vehicle. This has helped a lot, too.
Good luck. It’s a miserable problem to have.
Assuming small critters, I’'d go with snap traps.
Another vote for D-CON.
Now, the easiest thing is to simply put four to six (or whatever) D-CON blocks in the inside perimeter of your garage. But you shouldn’t do that if anything other than mice can get to them, e.g. children or pets. If there’s any chance children or pets can get to them, use the D-CON plastic traps. (A block goes in each trap, and the block is only accessible to mice.)
A good point. I have no such concerns, so I don’t bother with the plastic traps. And I place the D-CON where only the rodents getting into the car have access to the blocks.
Well, thanks for the responses. That is rather disheartening. We are going to try leaving traps on the seat tonight. Unfortunately we park in an alley and have a kid, so chemical warfare options are limited.
YMMV, but I’ve found it best to place the blocks along the inside perimeter of the garage, roughly ten feet apart.
I have no garage. 
I do employ that method in my workshop, though.
There are many, many YouTube videos on setting up a 5-gallon bucket mouse trap. Simple and they work.
Once dumped in the bucket you can kill the pests (by filling the bucket with water or vegetable oil or CO2…they will be dead when you check) or you can release them.
Cheap and effective. No poisons that might endanger your pets or children.
Once you make one or two they will work forever. Just replace the bait (generally peanut butter) and the water/oil/whatever (if anything) you use to kill them in the bucket.
ETA: I have read the reason for using oil is in cold climates in winter…water would freeze so they use oil instead.
Missed edit:
I would think CO2 would be the most humane but not sure if there are better alternatives.
We went camping up the Selway River one fall. Our car hosted the largest mouse kegger that night. In one night they chewed up everything they could find, left pee and poop EVERYWHERE. We were supposed to camp multiple nights but we got the fuck out of dodge and back home to cleanup the disaster zone. I left multiple snap traps in the car but they must’ve vacated once the kegs went dry.
I have much sympathy for your plight. Terrible!
As Aspenglow has said, once the little critters have made a scent trail into your car there is no getting rid of them. You can kill the current ones but other new ones will follow the scent trail. The car needs to be garaged while the critters are killed or you may need to sell the car.
Mice in Corolla is a common problem.
I don’t have much in the way of advice, but a really gross story I’m happy to share.
Two summers ago I got a new Kia Soul. It was shipped from another province and I picked it up here. A few weeks after I collected it, I got the shock of my life when I was driving home from work, glanced to the right, and saw a long mouse lying on its back in the corner of the dash. I freaked out for a few miles, as I couldn’t pull over right away. I finally did, grabbed some paper towels and flicked the mouse out onto the sidewalk, where it twitched for a bit. I was quite gobsmacked. I was literally wondering if someone in my office building had chucked a dying rodent into my car for kicks.
About a week later, I started to notice a kinda rank smell coming from the vents. Over another week it became nearly unbearable. Thankfully it was the summer and I could drive with my windows open, but it was still mentally torturous to even get into the car. I asked the pest control guy at the office to take a whiff, and he said it did smell like dead mouse.
So I took the car in and explained the problem. A couple of hours later I got a call, which was basically “AHA! We got it.” and I was texted a photo of my air filter, which was covered in grey insulation fuzz and the bodies of several baby mice. I guess the mouse that was tits-up on my dash was a mama who had gotten into the car at its Quebec storage warehouse, birthed her litter on my filter, made a nest from shredded insulation, then squeezed out of an air vent to give me nightmares. The dealership changed the filter and advised me to keep driving with the windows open for a few more days to let the smell dissipate. I try not to wonder about the molecules of mouse corpse that I was inhaling for several weeks.
I asked the guy at the shop if this was common, and he told me about another customer he’d had. This poor guy had bought a new car, a much fancier Kia than mine, and one of the first things he did was to drive it to a ferry dock, park it, then hop the boat to some island with his family for a few weeks. He got back to the car to find that, having parked it no distance at all from a wooded area, animals had made their way up into the undercarriage and into the car and chewed away at basically everything, leaving him with about $20,000 damage on his brand new car.
TL;dr. I don’t care much for the outdoors.
Been there, done th…, no, wait, I’m still doing it.
These work:
Peanut butter is good bait. Need to up your game? Peanut butter mixed with coconut oil.
I have one of these traps under my car tonight. If I get one in the morning, then that’s three in as many days.
I resort to poison on the rare occasion a rat is too smart for the trap, but since we have a cat (who to be fair does get a rat or two, but on his own schedule) I prefer not to use poison.
Nuclear option are glue traps, but even as much as I hate rats, those things are nasty. Last resort for me.
A warning I saw on the Tesla boards is that the mice love to chew on some of the wiring, since the insulation is eco-friendly organic stuff. I presume this may be the case with other vehicles too.
can confirm. Daughters car has this problem. Don’t know why it just the Corolla
Allegations that mice are attracted to soy-based wiring (used by Tesla, Toyota, and many others) have been around for a while, but the evidence is pretty thin. CarTalk had this to say:
https://www.cartalk.com/cars-content/dear-cartalk/no-clear-connection-between-soy-coated-wiring-and-rodents
Toyota got hit by a class-action lawsuit but it went nowhere due to lack of evidence. It’s not impossible there’s a connection… but mice chew on pretty much everything, so even if there is a relationship, it’s a matter of degree rather than kind.
I used one of those successfully to catch a mouse that was visiting our pantry indoors. I drove it to the edge of town a ways from any structures and let it go in the woods - it actually looked back at me with a “WTF??” look.
Anyway, we had rodents visiting our garaged cars last summer - I found droppings on top of the engine. The trap previously used did not work. Nor did the peppermint-scented rags left under the cars, or clipped under the hood. They just kept visiting and leaving little turds on top of the engine and other places. My son suggested leaving the hoods open with the light on - that did work for a while, until they got used to it. Evidently, they like the warmth of the engine compartment, as well as something about the battery attracting them.
Anyway, I determined the little shits were not nesting under the hood, just visiting and hanging out, taking a taste of this or that wire covering. I discovered they WERE nesting in my garage behind my water heater. Upon that discovery the nest was destroyed and the pests evicted. I also found a mouse nest in the yard under a wood pile that was likely responsible for supplying the pests in the first place - that got destroyed as well. Since then, no issues under the hoods.
I am guessing eliminating their nests not in the car, but nearby, did the trick.