Crazy kitten story with an even crazier epilogue

I'm going to do a bit of cut and paste here, as I wrote this on a Nextdoor post after a truly amazing story with my recently purchased IONIQ 5 RWD SE.

Craziest thing happened to me this week while driving Uber. I took a break at the Starbucks off Sand Hill Rd and came back to my car and was about to pull out when I saw a lady sitting at an outdoor table at another cafe pointing at my car and frantically trying to get my attention. Turns out she had seen a kitten under it and it had disappeared up into the underside of the vehicle! It's a brand new electric car, and there was very little visibility of where it could have gone. I got in and blasted the radio, rocked it, pounded on the sides and underside, but it must have been terrified and wouldn't come out. A crowd gathered, and someone called the fire department, and a truck arrived in minutes. Three firemen started disassembling panels of the car under the hood and eventually were able to extricate it. One of the workers at the cafe adopted the kitten on the spot. I'm very thankful to the lady who spotted it, and all who tried to help find it, especially the firemen who found a way to reach it. The kitten and the car are fine. One of those moments where one can find some faith in humanity. Everybody was great. Back on the road and I sure hope my car doesn't have some kind of magic kitten attracting properties!

It was a huge hit on Nextdoor, getting almost 300 reactions, and 100% positive, which is quite an achievement on Nextdoor. A local news station even caught wind of it and featured it on the evening news – a classic puff piece if you will.

Now, for that epilogue. I had a nice experience with the salesman, so I sent him a link to the news article, thinking he'd get a kick out of it. His reply floored me. "OMG – you found the kitten!"

I thought he was joking at first, but it turned out the cat had entered the car over 100 miles from where I bought it, while it was getting detailed. He had driven all the way there to swap it so I could get the color I wanted. The detailing crew only spoke Spanish, which he didn't. They somehow got across to him the fact that they'd seen a small kitten enter but not leave. The sales guy thought they had succeeded in driving it out, as there was no evidence of it when he inspected the car prior to picking it up. He then drove it back to my local dealership and the next day I took delivery.

I later calculated that the kitten – which couldn't have been more that a couple weeks old – had ridden in my car for over 300 miles and three days of travel all over the SF Bay Area! It didn't appear to be unhealthy when it was rescued, so maybe it had been making trips in and out of the car regularly during that time.

At first I was kind of pissed at the dealership for selling me a vehicle with somebody's pet possibly trapped inside and not mentioning anything about it. I took it back and they did a thorough re-inspection and even took a little off my payments for all the trouble. I really didn't want the young sales guy to get fired or anything, so I just accepted it as a crazy fluke with no real victims.

I'm still kind of wondering, though, if those round holes in the bottom of the car are a particularly inviting place for critters to hide out. Anybody had any unwanted guests stowing away in their IONIQs?