Car Cleaning Tips, Guides & How To's

The choice usually comes down to booking a detail or spending a Saturday on it yourself, and for most interiors the second one wins, provided you know which mess you are dealing with. Cloth seats, leather seats, and rubber or carpeted floor mats each want a different approach, and the tool that works on one can set a stain in another.

Coffee, road salt, grease, pet hair and a melted crayon in the footwell all come out of car carpet, but not with the same product or the same amount of heat. Steam lifts what a spray cannot on cloth upholstery; a wet extractor is better for a soaked carpet; and a vacuum with a crevice tool reaches the seat rails where the crumbs live.

A smell that keeps returning is almost never solved by an air freshener. It is usually spilled milk under a seat, a damp mat, or a cabin air filter that has been in place for years; that filter is a ten minute job behind the glove box and worth checking roughly once a year.

Outside, the job that changes a car’s face most is clearing the yellow haze off the headlights, which is oxidized plastic and comes back with sanding and a sealant rather than a wipe. Keeping it that way is mostly a bin that does not tip and mats you can hose off.