Category: Video

The ages-old rice trick doesn’t just work for smartphones, apparently – it also helped get this flooded Audi e-tron running again.

For many years now, an old wive’s tale has existed that suggests submerging a flooded electronic device – such as a smartphone – in rice will help suck the moisture out of it and make it good as new again. There are many that will tell you that this isn’t true, but also instances where it has worked, with some even saying that the dust from the rice can do more damage than good. Regardless, that didn’t stop YouTuber Rich Benoit of Rich Rebuilds fame from trying this ages-old trick on an entire car – a flood damaged Audi e-tron, to be specific.

Benoit purchased his Audi e-tron from a Copart auction just a few weeks ago with grand plans of restoring it back to new, a tall task – even for someone that’s already done precisely the same with with a flooded Tesla Model S (which he daily drove for years) and a Model X. But ripping those cars apart and spending countless hours bringing them back to life was one heck of a chore. And thus, Benoit figured, perhaps submerging the e-tron in 4.200 pounds of rice might actually speed up this process.

While some would wonder why anyone would buy such a heavily damaged vehicle in the first place, well, it’s all about value. Benoit paid a mere $56,000 for this 2,600-mile “gem,” which is roughly half its original MSRP of $110k. What he got, however, was a total wreck – a car that isn’t running or driving, and features water stains everywhere, along with a heaping helping of salt from the ocean waters that once filled every crack and crevice following a hurricane.

Once Benoit and his crew managed to get the e-tron powered up, it lit up like a literal Christmas tree, with the most concerning faults related to the car’s high-voltage battery system and pretty much everything else that makes it tick. Thus, before Benoit set out to spend a ton of money and replace all of these faulty components – or, at the very least, clean them up – he figured why not capture the attention of the internet and try the old fashioned rice trick?

Benoit and his team built a giant box to park the Audi in, wrapped it in a tarp, dumped rice on top of it, and waited for a few days to see what might happen. When some time had passed, they had to vacuum all of that rice out, but the results of all that work were simply amazing – the car actually ran and drove after the rice was removed, albeit with many fault codes still flashing on the gauge cluster. Regardless, it’s a pretty incredible result, and one that we would have never imagined could work on an entire car – not that we’re about to try and replicate this little science experiment ourselves.

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