Car polisher paint, remove swirls and scratches, spread wax or sealant, scrub a carpet, or clean headlights. When it comes to caring for the inside of your car it is just as important to choose the right car interior cleaning products as it is selecting your cars’ polish, wax or wheel cleaner. High quality professional car cleaning products from the very best brands in car care.
Sometimes even more so in that the interior of our cars can often get left much longer between cleans than the outside. Today we look at 5 of the best car interior cleaning products to help clean and protect the inside of your car.
There are 4 key areas to car interior cleaning that require the most frequent treatment; your dashboard, trim, seats and carpets.
I am going to detail some of the best products available for cleaning and protecting these 4 areas of the inside of your car. So without further ado.
Dashboard and Trim Cleaning & Protecting
When it comes to dashboard and trim cleaning products there are 3 camps – I like it glossy, I’m a midway sort of guy/gal and I like to keep it natural (matt). So finding the right product that cleans, protects and gives you the finish that you desire can be a little tricky.
Having tested many many car interior cleaning sprays, foam and wipes over the last 10+ years one of my personal favourites has come to be Meguiars Mirror Glaze Professional Vinyl & Rubber Cleaner/Conditioner.
It’s not the easiest of products to come by and if you can’t find it in the buff coloured bottle (Meguiars M40) look for it in the blue marine bottle (Meguiars M57) – same product just a different bottle and sometimes a little cheaper!
The beauty of this product is that depending on how long you leave the product on your dash or trim before buffing off will vary the finish that you get. Leave it for a short time and you get a glossy finish or several minutes and you can achieve a matt-like finish with varying degrees in between.
It is also has first-rate cleaning properties as well as UV protection agents to help maintain and enhance the look and life of your dashboard and trim.
If you sit in the keep it looking new and natural camp and are looking for a car interior cleaning product designed for this purpose then the Poorboys Natural Look would be another recommendation.
Poorboys Natural Look is a water based interior cleaner, again with UV absorbers for protection, that make it easy to restore and retain that “New Look” on your vinyl or leather dashboards and trim. It also leaves a natural matt finish and is non-greasy feel to the touch.
Car Seat Cleaning
Now this one really does depend on the type of seats you have. Today I am concentrating on the two main types of seat coverings; cloth and leather. There are various other types including nubuck(a type of leather) and Alcantara (a synthetic suede type finish). I will cover cleaning and protecting these types of coverings in a future post.
Leather Seats – One of the most popular products and one I used for many years is Gliptone GT12 Leather Cleaner and GT11 Conditioner.
The cleaner is easy to apply and gives a good deep down clean of your leather, especially if worked with a soft bristled brush and followed by a coat of the GT11 conditioner which softens and conditions your leather to help prevent it from cracking.
There is also a GT13.5 conditioner which includes a waterproofing agent, which is especially good for convertibles or where young kids are frequently in the back.
However with continual development of car seats including ventilation, heating etc the specifications of leather have had to change to meet these requirements. In line with these developments a number of new products have come on the market in the last couple of years which have been created specifically to cater for the more modern leathers as well as the older ones.
One such manufacturer is LRC (Leather Repair Company) (UK), and Trinova (Leather Nova) (US) who have developed a range of premium leather cleaners and protection creams for car seat and other forms of leather.
Cloth Seats – For cloth I have always found that foam or high foaming spray cleaners to be the best car interior cleaning products for seats. Two products that I have alternated between over the years have been Autoglym Hi-Foam Aerosol Interior Shampoo and Meguiars Carpet and Interior Cleaner.
The Autoglym product hits the surface of the cloth or carpet as a foam straight out of the can and then penetrates into the fibres to draw out the muck and grime, which you simply then wipe away after 30 seconds or so.
The Meguiars product on the other hand is a liquid spray that seeps into the fibres and foams up (albeit to a lesser degree than the Autoglym. Take note you have to leave it a little longer than the Autoglym but again is extremely effective at drawing our the muck and grime as well as also being very effective on stains.
Car Interior Cleaning of Carpets.
This one is really easy as the two products mentioned above for cloth seats are also equally as effective at cleaning carpets and thus you do not need to spend-out on separate products.
Although if like our household you may find that instead of remaining neatly lined up with your other detailing products they find their way under the sink or your cleaning cupboard as they are also very useful and effective on household carpets and cloth upholstery.
The only thing you might need to consider is a good quality car vacuum cleaner. If this is an item on your shopping or wish list it would be worth checking out our review and comparison article.