This article studies estimation and inference in the autoregressive (AR) models with unspecified and heavy-tailed heteroskedastic noises. A piece-wise locally stationary structure of the noise is constructed to capture various forms of heterogeneity, without imposing any restrictions on the tail index. The new nonstationary AR model allows for not only time-varying conditional features but also unconditional variance and tail index. This makes it appealing in practice, with wide applications in