News

Rats Are Waging War on Britain’s Cars

Your car alarm won’t help. Neither will a steering lock. The most destructive thieves currently targeting Britain’s vehicles are silent, tireless, and about six inches long.

Across the UK, a surge in rodent activity is turning modern cars into expensive chew toys. Insurance giant Aviva reports that between 2023 and 2024, claims for rat- and mouse-related vehicle damage jumped 28 percent, while the average repair bill climbed to £2,494. In other words: rodents aren’t just stealing crumbs anymore—they’re stealing your paycheck.

Winter is when things get ugly. As temperatures drop, mice and rats hunt for warmth, and today’s cars are basically rolling heated apartments. Grilles, air vents, and even half-open windows offer easy access. Once inside, rodents go straight for the good stuff.

“Chewing wires, gnawing interiors, nesting in engines,” explains Aviva motor claims manager James Driscoll. “They can cause significant damage.”

That damage is no joke. Ask the unlucky owner of a Porsche Cayenne who called in pest controller Tony Smith. A single rat destroyed the SUV’s wiring harness, triggering a £7,000 repair bill. That’s not nibbling—that’s financial assault.

Smith, who runs All Aspects Pest Control in Reading, says the rat population is now “out of control,” and modern cars are making the problem worse. The culprit? Bioplastics used in wiring insulation. Designed to be eco-friendly, these soy-based materials apparently taste fantastic to rats.

It’s like swapping steel for spaghetti.

Garages across the country are now dealing with rodent wreckage on a routine basis. At Ravenscroft Motors in Fleet, Hampshire, Lewis Devin tells stories that sound like rejected Pixar scripts.

A Ford Ranger needed a £200 repair after rodents damaged its transmission harness—then came back the next week with the exact same problem. Another car had its cooling fan jammed by nuts a squirrel had carefully stored between the blades. Foam engine covers? Eaten. Wiring looms? Shredded. Somewhere, a rat is driving a better-equipped car than you.

The scale of the problem is massive. Between 2023 and mid-2025, UK councils logged roughly half a million rodent-related incidents. The British Pest Control Association says more than half its members have seen rat callouts rise in the past five years.

And here’s the real twist: there’s not much anyone can do.

Permanent poison baiting is illegal because it threatens other wildlife, including endangered field mice. And rats, Smith says, are too smart for their own good. They avoid unfamiliar substances, meaning even when poison is used, it’s often ignored.

So Britain’s drivers are stuck in an expensive stalemate with nature—owning vehicles filled with soy-based wiring that smells like dinner to the local wildlife, while pest controllers are legally hamstrung from stopping the feast.

The modern automobile has become quieter, cleaner, and more efficient.

Unfortunately, it’s also become delicious.

If you ever hear scratching behind the dashboard, don’t panic. Just remember: it’s probably not a mechanical fault.

It’s just a rat calculating how much of your wiring harness it can afford to eat today.

Source: Autocar; Photo: Shutterstock

Tuning

The Red Pig Snorts Again—Now With Four-Digit Horsepower

Some legends never die. They just come back louder, angrier, and with turbochargers.

More than fifty years after Mercedes-Benz and the newly born AMG shocked the racing world with a massive V-8 sedan, the infamous “Rote Sau”—the Red Pig—has been reborn. This time, though, it’s not storming Spa-Francorchamps in factory colors. It’s tearing up California backroads with more than 1,000 horsepower and a carbon-fiber suit.

The original Red Pig was a rolling middle finger to conventional race-car thinking. Based on the stately Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.8, it used a thundering 6.8-liter V-8 to haul a luxury sedan to second overall at the Spa 24 Hours in 1971—an audacious debut that helped put AMG on the global performance map. The real car vanished after the race, sold off to Matra and lost to history, but its legend never faded.

Now it has a modern-day heir.

Instead of resurrecting a fragile museum piece, the builders at S-Klub took a far more radical approach: start with a fourth-generation Mercedes-AMG C63 and wrap it in a hand-built carbon-fiber interpretation of the old 300 SEL. It’s a restomod in the most literal sense—vintage looks, contemporary firepower.

And that firepower is absurd.

The C63’s twin-turbo 4.0-liter V-8 already makes about 510 horsepower in stock S-spec. That wasn’t nearly enough. S-Klub bolted on larger turbochargers, revised the downpipes, and reprogrammed the transmission. The result? A staggering 1,014 horsepower—more than double what the original Red Pig ever dreamed of—while shedding roughly 45 kilograms compared with a factory C63.

In other words, this thing doesn’t just honor history. It tries to rewrite it.

The mechanical madness is matched by the visuals. The wide arches, bright red paint, and cartoonishly aggressive stance mirror the 1971 racer, while details like the blacked-out grille, exposed chassis elements, and LED lighting drag the look firmly into 2025. There’s a full roll cage inside, KW V3 coilovers at the corners, and 18-inch VIP Moduler wheels filling out those bulging fenders. Even the AMG One-inspired steering wheel feels like a wink from the future.

Yet somehow, it all works. This Red Pig doesn’t look like a cosplay car. It looks like what AMG might build if it had no lawyers, no accountants, and absolutely no chill.

S-Klub’s Ed claims it’s the best-driving car they’ve ever built, and that’s saying something for a shop that lives and breathes Stuttgart. With factory brakes, much of the original C63 interior intact, and modern electronics keeping things just barely civilized, this is a race car you can drive to the track, obliterate lap times, and cruise home afterward.

The original Red Pig was outrageous because it wasn’t supposed to work. This one is outrageous because it works too well.

It may not be for sale—but if this is what homage looks like in the age of four-digit horsepower, the legend of the Red Pig has never been more alive.

Source: S-Klub

Tuning

Meet the 1,586-HP Yenko/SC Corvette E-Ray

Once upon a time, the Corvette was America’s attainable supercar. Now? With the arrival of the ZR1X and its twin-turbo V-8 hybrid powertrain, Chevy has kicked the door down on hypercar territory—and then Specialty Vehicle Engineering showed up with a sledgehammer.

Meet the Yenko/SC Corvette E-Ray, a car that takes Chevy’s all-wheel-drive hybrid C8 and turns it into something so violently powerful it makes a Bugatti Chiron look like it’s been hitting the gym only on leg day.

SVE’s starting point is the Corvette E-Ray, already the most usable and underrated C8 variant thanks to its front-mounted electric motor and standard AWD. But SVE wasn’t content with “underrated.” They wanted “obscene.” So they gutted and rebuilt the 6.2-liter LT2 V-8 with forged pistons, a forged crank, beefed-up rods, ARP hardware, a custom camshaft, and a new intake system designed to feed what came next.

That would be a pair of water-cooled, ceramic-bearing turbochargers—because, in the world of modern hypercars, forced induction is no longer optional.

Combined with the E-Ray’s electric motor, the result is a staggering 1,586 horsepower. That’s more than a Bugatti Chiron. That’s more than a ZR1X. That’s more than any Corvette in history by a margin so large it feels disrespectful.

The eight-speed dual-clutch transmission has been fortified to survive this madness, and SVE adds a boost-by-gear system so the tires don’t immediately dissolve into smoke. With all-wheel drive helping claw the car forward, this Yenko could very well become the quickest street-legal Corvette ever built. No official numbers have been released, but SVE hints at quarter-mile times in the low-eight-second range, which is drag-strip-terrorist territory.

Visually, the Yenko/SC E-Ray will stand apart thanks to custom forged wheels—20 inches up front, 21 inches out back—plus unique graphics and badging. There’s a bespoke exhaust, color-matched brake calipers, and light interior tweaks, including new floor mats and skid plates. It’s more hot-rod than haute couture, and that’s exactly the point.

And here’s the truly wild part: SVE backs the twin-turbo engine with a three-year, 60,000-kilometer warranty. That’s a bold move when you’re asking a GM-designed small-block to output more than one and a half megawatts of power. After that coverage runs out, though, you’d better keep your savings account well fed—because the LT2 was never supposed to live this kind of life.

In an era when hypercars cost seven figures and arrive with velvet ropes and long waiting lists, the Yenko/SC E-Ray offers a very American alternative: buy a Corvette, give it to a tuner with no fear, and embarrass everything short of a rocket ship. For an automotive journalist with a weakness for outrageous machines, that’s about as good as it gets.

Source: Specialty Vehicle Engineering

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