Best Car Interior Cleaners of 2020
| Product | Type | Size | Type of cleaning surface | Protect option | Features | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CarGuys Super Cleaner (Editor's Choice) |  | Car interior cleaner | 18 oz. (with towel) or 128 oz. | Leather, vinyl, carpet upholstery, plastic, rubber, cloth | Yes | May includes towel | Check Price |
| Meguiar's Complete Car Care Kit |  | Car interior cleaner kit | - | All interior surfaces | Yes | All-in-one kit for any car enthusiast | Check Price |
| Chemical Guys Leather Care Kit |  | Car interior leather cleaner kit | 2 x 16 oz. or 2 x 4 oz. | Leather | Yes | - | Check Price |
| Blue Magic Carpet Stain & Spot Lifter |  | Carpet stain aerosol cleaner | 22 oz. | Carpet | - | - | Check Price |
| TriNova Plastic & Trim Restorer |  | Cleaner for black car interior kit | 8 oz. | Plastic and trim | Yes | Includes applicator pad | Check Price |
1. CarGuys Super Cleaner – Most Powerful Option for Plastic, Vinyl and Cloth Seats
Considering the extraordinarily high number of surfaces and materials that this cleaner is effective at removing filth from, it’s somewhat like the Swiss Army Knife of car interior cleaners. You can easily clean virtually every type of material or fabric that you are likely to encounter in a car interior with this one product alone. Though it’s not recommended that you use it on glass, it’s very easy to compensate for this with another product if you absolutely must clean your windows and windshield along with your interior.
This cleaner also has anti-static properties that neutralize all static electricity once it is applied to any surface. Since dirt, hair and other debris can be attracted to your car interior by static, this is highly useful for keeping things clean for some time after you’ve actually scrubbed everything down. It also offers UV protection for your dashboard, keeping it looking good for longer.
Though you’ll end up paying more for CarGuys Super Cleaner than you would for most other car interior cleaners – even in proportion to the amount of cleaner in the bottle – its impressive cleaning power makes the price worth it.
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2. Meguiar’s Complete Car Care Kit – Best All-Purpose Cleaner and Protectant
Assembled for those who want to leave nothing to chance when it comes to cleaning their cars, this kit is the most full-spectrum collection of car cleaning products that you’re likely to find in one place. It includes a total of 10 car cleaning products from Meguiar that are designed not only for the interior of your car but for the exterior as well. The products specifically meant to clean your car’s interior are:
- Quik Interior Detailer: An all-purpose interior cleaner effective on all sections of the interior and meant to give them a restored and rejuvenated look.
- PlastX Clear Plastic Cleaner & Polish: Useful for cleaning the plastic screens and surfaces on your dashboard.
- Soft Foam Applicator Pads: Soft pads or sponges that you can use to scrub out stains after you have applied your cleaner.
- Microfiber Towels: Good for wiping down the interior after cleaning is complete.
Other products included in this set that are focused primarily on cleaning the exterior of your car are:
- Gold Class Car Wash Shampoo and Conditioner
- Gold Class Liquid Wax
- Quik Detailer
- Clay Bars
- ScratchX 2.0
- Microfiber Wash Mitt
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3. Chemical Guys Leather Care Kit – Best Choice for Leather
This kit includes two items. The first is a leather cleaner in a spray bottle meant to be applied either directly to your leather upholstery or dashboard, or to a brush which you then use to scrub that upholstery or dashboard. The second is a leather conditioner. The conditioner is meant to moisturize and restore the leather, preventing it from cracking or drying. As with the cleaner, you are supposed to apply the conditioner either directly to the leather itself or to a sponge or towel, which you then use to wipe down the leather.
Be sure to only apply the conditioner after you have finished cleaning.
The cleaner penetrates the leather material’s pores, lifting dust dirt, grime and oils to the surface where they can be easily removed. Neither the cleaner nor the conditioner leaves any residue, keeping your car interior looking pristine. Both products are also odorless, ensuring that nothing will interfere with that alluring leather smell.
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4. Blue Magic Carpet Stain & Spot Lifter – Budget Option for Car Carpets
This is an extremely powerful carpet cleaner that works to lift all manner of stains up to the surface of your car’s carpets immediately after it is sprayed onto whatever stained area you’ve chosen to target with it. It’s powerful enough to eliminate a broad spectrum of deep and persistent stains, including oil, water, coffee, tar, blood, wine, grease and urine. We think it’s wise to take care of what will likely be the dirtiest part of your car’s interior with something exceptionally powerful, and we think that this product is sure to be more than sufficient to meet your carpet cleaning needs.
It’s so powerful, in fact, that you may not even need to vacuum your carpets as a prelude to cleaning then. Even so, just for the sake of thoroughness, we recommend vacuuming them anyway.
Powerful as it is, though, this product is only a carpet cleaner. To clean other parts of your car’s interior, you will have to seek out something else.
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5. TriNova Plastic & Trim Restorer – Premium Pick for Black Interior
This product is meant to shine up and restore worn-out plastic, vinyl and rubber surfaces. This makes it an excellent choice for cleaning and shining all of the screens across the breadth of your dashboard. If your car has vinyl upholstery, this can make your seats look virtually brand new. And you certainly can’t go wrong using it to clean up and restore the rubber on your carpets or the plastic or rubber floor mats that you might be using in your car.
Its versatility makes it useful not only when caring for the interior of your car, but for the exterior as well. You should be aware, though, that this product primarily serves a restorative function. Although it does have the ability to clean your interior, it’s far from the strongest cleaner out there. It may be best to apply it after you’ve cleaned the interior with a different product if things are especially dirty.
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Buyer’s Guide
Now that we’ve discussed some excellent car interior cleaners and given you some idea of what they can do, we think it’s best to round out your understanding a bit more so that you’ll be a confident shopper when on the lookout for the best way to protect the inside of your car from the ravages of time and repeated use. Here, we’d like to give you some information that we think every prospective buyer of car cleaning products should have. We’ll be discussing the different parts of a car’s interior and their different characteristics, the qualities that we think every good car cleaning product should have and some general tips on how to to keep your car interior looking as orderly and close to immaculate as possible.
But first, let’s say a general word about why you should have a car interior cleaner on hand at all.
Why Should You Get a Car Interior Cleaner?
Eventually, just about everything that’s left to itself will fall apart and degrade. Leave food out in the open without preservatives or refrigeration, and it will rot. Leave your house completely without any maintenance or care for a year, and you’ll return to a crumbling, critter-infested nightmare. Drive a car around long enough without making sure that the engine and brakes are in good working order, and it will surely break down on you.
In short, things break down over time. The same is true for your car’s interior. If you refuse to take the trouble to clean it every so often, it will eventually morph into a pigsty. To prevent this, you need to have a few things, chief among them being a reliable and effective car interior cleaner.
Main Parts of a Car Interior
The typical car interior consists of a number of distinct parts or sections, each of which gets dirty in their own ways and has their own particular cleaning needs and techniques best suited to them. To get the best overall cleaning for your whole car interior, you first have to know what the special characteristics of each of these sections are, how and to what degree they usually become dirty, and to what sorts of cleaning products or methods they best respond. Here, we’ll briefly discuss what these sections are and tell you what you need to know.
Upholstery
This refers to the seats, seat covers, padding and other covers throughout the interior of the car, whether those are made of vinyl, leather or some other material. Frequently, car upholstery gets dirty over time as people riding in the car leave food crumbs or little bits of spilled drink throughout. People also sweat naturally and leave all sorts of skin oils on car seats. If you have dogs or other pets, they provide another source of dirt or hair that can easily get stuck in your upholstery.
Odors can seep into your upholstery and linger around because of all this. That means that any good upholstery cleaner will be able to seep into the upholstery and provide a deep clean that covers more than just the surface. It should also be able to remove odors and stains.
Carpets
Carpets are arguably the dirtiest parts of a car interior, the ones that get dirty the fastest and the ones that require the most maintenance to keep clean. The reasons for this are pretty clear. People place their feet onto carpets when sitting in a car and their shoes are generally laced with dirt and dust. To keep your car’s carpets clean, then you’ll need an especially strong cleaner that penetrates deep into the fabric to eliminate filth of all kinds.