This is an ODD question, but it’s driving me crazy and I’m hoping someone might just have a suggestion.
I have a little Pontiac Sunfire… that somehow seems to be infested with ants.
It started slowly. I saw a couple ants inside the car and just thought, “Oh, they just randomly snuck inside somehow like all insects.” So I just ignored them. Then one day I ate a candy bar on the way to work and left the wrapper in the car, figuring I’d throw it out when I got home. After work I came back to find a SWARM of ants INSIDE my car, feasting on melted chocolate.
So my dad went through my car and vacuumed the interior. Since then, I haven’t seen any ants inside my car. Outside, however…
I’m still getting a ton of little ants crawling over the outside of my car. It doesn’t matter if I’m at home or work, they’re there happily crawling around. None of the other cars around have ants crawling on them, just mine. I got fed up and took my car, ants and all, through the car wash. They were back later.
So my question comes to, is it REALLY possible for ants to INFEST a car? Could they have nested in it somewhere? But HOW and where? If anyone has any experience with this or ANY suggestions at all on how to get rid of the ants, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks for reading!
Well there are many different kinds of ants. Where (what part of the country) do you live? The control would depend on the kind of ant, time of year etc.
The easy solution could be nothing more than finding someplace other to park you car for a week or so. Maybe a block away. Again it will depend on the type of ant. A local exterminator would be able to answer the questions and take care of the problem.
I think you need to spray home pest spray around all cracks and crevices in the car. Do it in the evening so the spray works overnight. Do this once a week for four weeks. I suspect the ants are surviving inside your car, between the carpet and the metal floor. While this is no guarantee that this will fix the problem, it is a good start for $10 or so. If that doesn’t work, my next step would be a professional exterminator.
Hey Jamie Lea- before you go looking in the book for exterminators, just buy a couple bucks worth of ant traps! They look like little black hockey pucks. We parked a Geo Storm behind a barn in VA for about 6 months and found it filled with ants also! Since we were intending to drive it again, we bought a pkg of 2 traps and put one in the truck/hatch area and one in the passenger door pocket. Within days they were gone. We left the traps for a month- just to be sure 
Ants are attracted to food. They don’t occupy an area such as an automobile unless there is a food source within it.
You gave a hint when you said that you recently ate a candy bar on the way to work and left the wrapper in the car. If you’ve done that more than once, you may have left candy wrappers with remnants, if not an entire candy bar somewhere under a carseat, trunk or some other place inside.
Also, if you’ve spilled a sugary drink somewhere in your vehicle, using a vaccuum would not be enough to get rid of it.
If it were my car, I’d use a good cleaning product to clean the inside mats, carpets and seats (and trunk). Then spray the interior with lysol and leave the windows closed for a few hours and vaccuum again.
Also, if you park under certain trees, they will leave a sweet sap on the car that is difficult to clean off because it is sticky. So, even going thru a carwash won’t do it.
So, in addition to the above, give your car a good wash and wax.
That should do it.
P.S. As a last resort, If you’re really desperate and want to nuke the problem, you can use a product like Raid Fumigator.
But if you do, you will still need to clean the car’s inside and then air it out for one or two days.
I’m in Michigan actually. And the seem to be the kind of little ants that like the dig holes in sand and through the cracks of pavement. Nothing really threatening, but definitely an irritation.
Well, as I said, since we vacuumed, they haven’t been on the interior of the vehicle. I’ve checked the trunk too and didn’t find any, though that needs some vacuuming as well. Perhaps it’s like you said with the trees, though I don’t park under or near any, it is possible something else got on my car that a basic wash can’t get rid of. I’ll see about getting it a good wax sometime. Thank you.
I’ll probably give that a try and pick up some ant traps at work tomorrow. I just have to leave them on top of the car. It’s worth a shot, thanks!
Suggestion Kiddo- if you ‘think’ they are only on the outside- think again. You might try one on top of the car and one inside… No offense!
Conventional wisdom is that ants won’t go where there is no food…well then you haven’t met the new crazy ants here in Texas. They are so new they don’t even have a real name yet, and they swarm all over everything food or no food.
When gas got to $4 a gallon I parked my truck in the back yard and now it’s covered in these almost microscopic but annoying ants.
I have washed it twice and they keep coming back covering the entire truck. I am going crazy trying to figure out how to stop them from swarming all over my truck.
Hello, I’ve just finished work (in the UK) drove home and my car is covered in hundreds of ‘flying ants’. Yesterday I washed and waxed my car, and the wax I used smelled rather sweet. I suppose the ants could have been actually attracted by my washing and waxing!!
IMHO all manner of things can attract ants to cars. I was stupid enough to take delivery of a new Mitsubishi Outlander VRX (GT in the US) from the dealership in the evening. It wasn’t until the next day I discovered the car was infested with thousands of tiny ants.
Now bear in mind this is a NEW car we are talking about here. No one has bought any kind of food into the car (well not in the few hours I had it), so one might wonder how they got in there in the first place? The car is parked next to my older car which has never had ants in it, so I’m stumped as to where they came from or how they got there. Of course I returned the car to the dealer that same day. They said that they had found some ants present but claim they can’t find any nest in the car. Weeks later I’m still plagued with these pests.
Because my old car which is parked right next to new one hasn’t got any ants in it, I’m seriously suspecting the new car is harbouring a concealed nest in it. The problem is simply trying to locate it. Sadly the dealer is not overly enthusiastic about rectifying the problem and even more annoying is Mitsubishi Motors Austalia aren’t doing anything about it either. 
I’m going to try some ant baits as has been suggested elsewhere in this thread. Maybe it just might solve the problem.