Theyre Putting Soy In Your Wires, Man
I’ve got a friend who tells me at every opportunity that soy is the downfall of humanity. Whatever ails us as a society, it’s the soy beans that did it. They increase violent tendencies, they make us fat and lazy, they run farmers out of business, and so on. He laments at how hard it is to find food that doesn’t include soy in some capacity, and for a while was resigned to eating nothing but chicken hot dogs and bags of frozen peas; anything else had unacceptable levels of the “Devil’s Bean”. Overall he’s a really great guy, kind of person who could fix anything with a roll of duct tape and a trip to the scrap pile, but you might think twice if he invites you over for dinner.
So when he recently told me about all the trouble people are having with soy-based electrical wiring, I thought it was just the latest conspiracy theory to join his usual stories. I told him it didn’t make any sense, there’s no way somebody managed to develop a reliable soy-derived conductor. “No, no,” he says, “not the conductor. They are making the insulation out of soy, and animals are chewing through it.”
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Frustrated Motorists, Happy Rats
Sure enough, a Google search for “soy wires” will get you plenty of hits about people who are experiencing a very strange problem. During the night, animals are getting up into the engine compartments of their cars and eating the insulation off the wiring harness. It isn’t just one or two cases either, it’s enough of a problem that some car manufacturers are getting hit with class-action lawsuits.
Daniel Dobbs, et al. v. American Honda Motor Co. Inc claimed that Honda vehicles manufactured from 2012 to 2015 made use of soy insulated wires on the basis of it not only being better for the environment, but cheaper than traditional insulation. Unfortunately, this type of insulation is also very popular with the local wildlife:
Unbeknownst to Plaintiffs, however, a real and contentious unintended and undesired consequence of this soy-based insulation material is that it attracts rodents and other animals that are drawn by the soy content of the insulation, and proceed to chew through the insulation and electrical wires that the insulation coats
https://hackaday.com/2018/01/15/theyre-putting-soy-in-your-wires-man/
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