Spiders May Be Infesting Your Car

The more I write about spiders, the more I'm convinced they are harbingers of the apocalypse. Think about it: They can eat fish twice their size and walk on water. They are using our cities to grow fatter and breed more. And now, it turns out, they're even in our machinery — Suzuki has recalled over 19,000 cars because spiders were in the vent hoses, weaving webs that lead to potentially fire-causing blockages (read: explosions). Terrifyingly? This isn't even the first time.

Yes, Suzuki has never before dealt with an arachnid infestation (that we know of), but other sedans have certainly been known to attract the eight-legged critters. Both Honda and Hyundai have also had issues with yellow sac spiders blocking vents with their webs, and just last May, Ford sent out a technical service bulletin warning customers that spiders were clogging the cars' vents. Mazda has had issues with spiders twice in the last three years, leading to a combined recall of roughly 90,000 cars — the yellow sac spiders were invading the gas tanks of Mazda6 sedans across the U.S. as recently as this April.

Quite apart from the eek-factor of having small, crawling, web-making creatures lurking in your mobile changing room/home-away-from-home, these spiders are posing a pretty big risk to drivers. The critters — who, as it turns out, just can't get enough of those gasoline hydrocarbons — make their way into the cars' evaporative emissions systems. There, they get comfortable. They weave some webs. These webs then cause a blockage in the air flow, leading to negative pressure in the fuel tank. What happens when there's a build-up of negative pressure in a fuel tank? Oh, you know, just a few cracks or leaks — that can cause sparks, fires, and explosions.

So far, though, nothing that serious has actually happened. Still, Suzuki received not one, but seven complaints about spiders clogging up the vent hoses, before they decided to issue a recall. Now, according to a press release published by the NHTSA, thousands of Suzuki Kizashi cars will have to go back to their dealers where their existing vents will be replaced by spider-proof ones, which will have a little filter on them.

Although Suzuki hasn't specified the type of spider that infested its sedans, it's likely that it's the same culprit that plagued the Mazda6: the dreaded yellow sac, which, according to Michigan State University, is behind "more human bites that any other type of spider." (Unless, of course, it's something much, much more terrifying.)