Even neat people can live in squalor when it comes to the family car. Carpets get loaded with ingrained mud, sand and debris. Upholstery can gather multiple stains from food, children and the warehouse grit of shopping trips and general travel. I asked Jody Victor to give us some tips on keeping our old and new cars looking great!
Jody Victor: Taking care of any car can be easy if you don't let it go too long. It is way better to use a little elbow grease once or twice a month than to wait and have a monster job on your hands.
With that in mind, you can buy special car-interior cleaners, but for plastic surfaces you can use any hard-surface cleaner such as Zoom and for vinyl and leather areas in your car use a Vinyl & Leather Cleaner. Once you have wiped, swiped and vacuumed the inside of the car, you may still have to deal with upholstery stains.
You can try using any carpet-upholstery cleaning spray or spot remover on the seats. On carpeted foor mats you can use the same products or for really tough stains, take them to a carpet-cleaning service or your local car care expert.
Ridding a car of odors can be another challenge. The first step is to get all the interior fabrics clean with pet-spot cleaner or another odor-fighting cleaning product. Don' forget to wipe down the headliner, the cloth covering inside the roof. Some commercial deodorizers claim they eliminate rather than merely mask odors from mold, smoke and other causes. Large auto-parts stores carry such products.
You can also try cleaning odors from the climate-system ducts by spritzing odor eliminator into the system's air intake. That's usually located beneath the hood cowl, near where the windshield wipers park. Then run the air conditioner for at least 10 minutes.
Cleaning the outside of the engine and other under-hood components can be aknuckle-scraping, tedious chore. But it's good to have a sparkling clean engine bay if you are about to sell the car, and your mechanic will appreciate it in any case. Consider this a nicety rather than a necessity.
Thanks, Jody! We'll be using these tips soon!