Chores are a pain but putting them off just means even worse suffering down the road. Y’all have seen your fair share of devastatingly dirty cars. From the leavings of children (always the children!) to the crusty film left by folks in that #VapeLife.
Click through to see the awful messes your fellow readers have cleaned out of cars.
It will always be my kids car seats. I honestly try to not let them eat in the car much, but there is always some sort of food in them or coming out of them. I am a pretty regular car cleaner, about once a month for my car and my wife’s. But those things are always disgusting.
Yesterday after driving them to school and getting my older kid into the building I came back to take my younger kid to class and she just throws up all over her car seat. I will be a very happy person when we can switch to boosters and then get rid of kid seats altogether. At least the booster seats are much easier to remove and clean, the 0-5 or 6 year old seats are like traps when it comes to anything that can be dropped.
and
Great call because it’s 100% true. I’m pretty sure I’m still cleaning vomit out of all the cracks and crevices from an incident two years ago.
From Big Block I-4, FijiST and others
It might not be all that nasty, but my mess has a funny story behind it. About 20 years ago when I was in college a friend and I went to a party on very cold Michigan winter night. I consumed far too much beer and gin. At some point someone made a run to Burger King, and I asked for two larger orders of onion rings. A little while after eating it my sober friend and I decided to leave. I must not have been looking well, because he kept asking me if I felt okay, and said he’d pull over if I didn’t. I kept assuring him I was fine, until I wasn’t. He was driving his Grand Prix coupe down a main road at ~55 mph when I suddenly felt very not okay. I unrolled the passenger window, leaned out, and let loose. Of course it being a coupe with long doors some of that made it into the car, as well as all over the side of it. My friend pulled the car over, and the window wouldn’t go back up because they weren’t working quite right at the time. After moving them up and down, and working puke deep inside of the door, I finally got the window up.
I was of course very apologetic about all of this, and when he got me home I ran inside to get supplies to clean my friend’s car. I came outside with a was of sopping wet paper towel, and proceeded to smear the puke, complete with onion ring chunks, all over the side of my friends car. Because it was only 10 degrees outside it immediately froze in place. My frustrated friend told me not to worry about it and left. He was apparently up until 6am cleaning puke off the side and inside of his car, and had to remove the door panel to try and clean it from the inside of the door.
And
I actually have a similar story! I was a designated driver for three friends that got really drunk… at lunch. While in high school. Everyone gets the munchies, so we go to KFC. I spent most of the time keeping the poor staff from calling the cops but managed to finish eating and get back in the car. Ten minutes later the guy in the passenger seat projectile vomits on the dash. I start screaming “out the window you dumb ass!” He seemed to acknowledge because he rolled the window down. This is when the rear seat passengers realized what was going on and started screaming “not yet!” I hear something about “roll the window up” right as the guy next to me hurls out the window. I’m not sure how much re-entered the back seat, but it did seem like there were bits of green cole slaw all over the back seat and back seat occupants. I stopped at the vomitous passengers’ house, got out and went to go to my own car. “Good luck with your mom’s car!” From what I understand, they sobered up enough to clean the car inside and out before the parents got home from work. I don’t think they ever got the vomit out of the AC vents though - that car never smelled right again.
From panthercougar and dolsh
I worked for a rental car company as my first job right out of college and, let me tell you, I have seen all manner of automotive nasty that would make even the most extreme of fetishists ill.
I remember one time cleaning out a recently returned Chevrolet Metro with more hedonistic artifacts than a Tim Allen hotel room. Used prophylactics, needles (not for insulin), cigarette butts, food in various stages of completion, stains on the upholstery (likely not from the aforementioned food), and smeared fingerprints all over the windows.
Most of us at the rental branch got a good laugh out of it, me being the notable exception as I was the one “voluntold” to clean it out. The only thing that kept me from gagging the entire time was marveling at how they were able to do all of this in a car the size of a Metro. I guess it’s not the size that counts...
From paradsecar
Bought a $300 Venture minivan years ago. It had a stack of receipts including new tires with 3K miles on them that cost almost twice what I paid for the van.
Here is what the back cargo area looked like. I wound up just throwing the carpet away and replacing it with one from the local U-pull. It smelled like it looked.
From dustynnguyendood
I drove an El Camino in NYC in the early eighties. I cleaned actual drunks out of the bed of it in the mornings. The amount of people who thought it was funny to climb in the bed and then pass out like it was their bed was unreal. Plus all the usual detritus. I honestly just used a broom, a lot of the time, just swept it straight off the back. Before I moved there, I also cleaned deer guts out of the back after an uncle of mine cleaned a deer out in there. Somehow, the crap generated by New Yorkers was worse.
From skeffles
My own car, the 2005 Smart Fortwo I got for free six years ago.
During summer 2021 I parked the car outside with a car cover on it. The car cover was a little too big, so I thought that I’d make it fit better by closing some of it up in the doors. For some odd reason I thought that this would work. Instead, water trickled in and pooled up in the parts of the cover that were inside of the car.
When I opened the doors to take the car cover off? Gallons of water spilled in. And yet, it never crossed my mind to dry out the interior before parking the car in my warehouse for the winter. But, I did just that, anyway, and when I came back to the car in 2022 it was basically a Superfund site.
Here’s a pic from while my wife was cleaning it up.
Mold was on everything from the ignition to the seatbelts. My wife attacked it with an aggressive residential mold removal cleaner pumped through a heated upholstery cleaning machine. So far, so good! The car’s been doing great ever since.
From: Mercedes Streeter (HIIIII!)
I have a near miss that would have been the absolute nastiest.
Last year I met my wife after work at the pumpkin patch, fall stuff and all. We got a bunch of pumpkins with our daughter and put them all in my wife’s SUV. The back end was full but we also needed to go grocery shopping, so we went to Costco. I had my Corvette, which is a C5 convertible, so with the top up there’s actually a decent amount of space since the trunk is open to the cabin.
Well our trip filled up the entire trunk, we unloaded at home and that was that. A week or so later I was thinking “I thought we had gotten one of their huge sliced salami packages” but figured we must have forgotten, left it in the cart, etc. Thought nothing of it after that.
Cut to middle of August this year, I was driving the Corvette and had to stop quick for something and a CD case slid down behind my seat. I felt something else down there and had to move the seat all the way forward and up to get it out. It was the salami, completely green, luckily somehow still sealed after being pinned under a car seat that was moved back and forth every time I got in. It had fallen behind same way the CD case had and I never noticed it, I likely would have if it had been broken open but if it broke open after being fully green I may have had to get rid of the car...
I bought my 2000 Dodge Grand Caravan from my former employer earlier this summer for $200.00. I was familiar with it; I drove it mostly for business until they put me into a 2014 Chevrolet Impala.
When I picked it up, I was shocked and heartbroken. The third row seat was removed and placed it the garage, covered in dust and cobwebs, with mud wasp nests underneath. The van’s insides was completely trashed. The carpet was covered in paint, oil, paint thinner, gas and diesel stains. Some of the paint was hardened into rock-solid puddles. The head liner was ripped, the rear gate was jammed shut, there were stains in the front seats, paper, receipts, fast-food bags and wrappers and empty bottlers and cups were everywhere. There were a couple of bottles that were filled with what looked to be fermented, molded pee. My poor van had become a garbage truck.
You bet I was mad.
From IDM3
Dad bought a used diesel VW Rabbit in the eighties to rock as a commuter because gas prices. Base model, didn’t even have AC (can you even buy a new car today without AC?). By and by, he had to take Mom’s purebred Bluetick Coonhound to the vet and, of course, that pup puked all over the back seat. Dad took the interior apart and cleaned it like some of those car detailing videos and figured he was all good. Then, around late spring as the temps came up and that car sat in his office parking lot for 10 hours a day, that odor returned with a vengeance. He sold the car to some kid when there was snow on the ground.
Diesel exhaust with reheated dog vomit is not the worst thing I’ve ever smelled, but it’s up there.
From Scotty J
I’ve cleaned up my fair share of puke, food, etc. (three kids), but the one thing they left behind that surprised me was a crayon/juice mixture. One of my twins left about three broken crayons in a third row cupholder and he spilled some juice in it because obviously the juice box wasn’t resting well in there. Fast forward a couple weeks in the Texas heat, and I discover it - an almost fully hardened, multi-colored glob with a little bit of fuzz growing on it. My boys learned how to chisel that day and got the bulk of it out, then I spent a couple days soaking it with various cleaners and scrubbing it until it was somewhat presentable.
From Ours Blanc
Porn.
A whole lot of really low quality yet highly explicit porn. Worked at a car dealership one summer, and one of my duties was the wash rack. I was vacuuming out a customer’s car and discovered the stash under the seat. I would take all the sour milk, vomit, urine, and whatever other horrific things people list here if I could just unsee that porn. (Technically, I didn’t clean it out of the car. I had to clean around it and then put that shit back. Ick.)
Once had to clean a car that had been owned by someone who owned a vape shop, and clearly got high on their own supply, so to speak, so many empty vape bottles and pens, plus the screen in front of the driver’s seat was so covered in residue it looked like it was frosted. It was downright misty with vape residue. And it stank, all the various vape scents had mingled, and it stank like fruity garbage.
All in all, I’d almost rather have dealt with a cigarette addict’s car.
From plant_daily