These Are The Best Car Cleaning Hacks On The Internet

For some car enthusiasts, cleaning the car is as important to the experience as driving. They'll set aside a handful of hours every other Saturday to get hands-on with the paint, wheels, tires, interior fabrics, leather, and plastics, scrubbing every inch of daily use from their pride and joy. They'll have hundreds of dollars of car cleaning products, detailing brushes, polishers, foam cannons, and attachments of every kind.

The rest of us normal folks will run a car through a touchless car wash once a month, and maybe give the car an intricate detail once to prepare for winter, and once when winter is over. We may not have the garage full of cleaning tools, or the warm-water pressure washer. We have a bucket and a few microfiber towels, and an arsenal of car cleaning hacks that use everyday products to keep our cars clean.

Here are some great hacks to get your started.

Normally when you see life hacks they're usually more effort or less effective than the conventional way, but once in a while a gem comes along

- courtesy of @that40yearguy #WeirdCarTwitter pic.twitter.com/RAXlYMMjqT

— Trinity G Francis (@TrinityGFrancis) February 26, 2024

If the vacuum cleaner can't get everything out of your floor mats, attack it with a drill brush. If you don't want to overpay for a fancy name-brand drill brush, just buy a cheap toilet brush at the five and dime and cut the handle off. Boom, hacked.

I haven't tried this one out, but apparently synthetic leather is a good way to remove gunk and caked-on grease from your windows. I've always been annoyed by the buildup where the window sits against the seals. I'll have to give this one a try.

Sprinkle some baking soda on an orange and swipe it around your foggy plastic headlight housings. This doesn't have the long-term effects that wet sanding and sealing will have, but if you need to clean a car up real quick (for sale photos, maybe?) this should work.

This one went viral a few years ago, but it's still true. You can use a massage gun, even a cheap one, to agitate the deepest dirt particles out of your car's rugs. It's pretty cool to do this one, and I highly recommend it.

I'm sure the high-end car wash companies will have all kinds of things to say about this one. Dish soap isn't the best thing to use to wash a car either, but I've definitely done it. If it works, it works.

This is a good hack for your home interior as well as your car interior. Anywhere pet hair has embedded itself that the vacuum can't get out, use a rubber squeegee.

Look, if ChrisFix says it works, it absolutely works.

Make sure you're using dye-free shaving foam, not shave gel. Apparently this hack dates back to the great depression. They didn't have fancy gels back then, so just get the cheap no-scent no-extras stuff.

Or better yet, just use something actually designed for cleaning cars.

Toothpaste, as in the actually abrasive diatomaceous stuff, is basically a mint-flavored polish. You can definitely polish out small scratches and paint transfer from your fender bender.

What more needs to be said?

If you need to paint your wheels, but don't feel like dismounting the tires or putting a bunch of painter's tape on the sidewalls, just pick up a deck of cards. Wedge the cards into the bead between the tire and the wheel, and you're masked off in no time flat. I used to run this hack to give my winter steelies a fresh coat of black every fall.

Remember the toilet brush we turned into a carpet cleaner a while ago? Now it's doing double-duty as a cupholder brush. Brilliant!

Remove window tint adhesive with a trash bag and a rag daubed in DOT3 brake fluid. Just make sure you don't get the brake fluid on anything else. It'll eat through paint like acid.

If you need to disinfect something, get yourself a handle of Kamchatka. You can get 1.75 liters of the stuff for less than ten bucks, which is way cheaper than any other kind of disinfectant you can buy. Hell, that's almost cheaper than water. Put it in a spray bottle and clean up your interior. Of course, reeking of cheap vodka will make traffic stops a little more interesting.

Save lots of time and money by simply never cleaning your car at all. I got away with at least five years of using my ratty 1976 Porsche 912E and never once hitting it with soap. It got washed when I drove it in the rain. That strategy seemed to work fine.