Automotive carpets tend to collect dirt and grit much more quickly than the carpets in your home. Without regular care and cleaning, car carpets will begin to mat down over themselves, ruining the carpet’s nap and significantly decreasing the value of the vehicle. In order to offset this tendency, you have to clean the carpet in your car regardless of whether you use floor mats or not. In some cases, floor mats will allow the dirt and debris to remain hidden around the edges of the mat for much longer than the carpet is capable of handling. Fortunately, cleaning your car’s carpeting isn’t particularly difficult, especially if you clean the carpet every time you clean the car itself.
Begin by removing the floor mats from the vehicle. If they are rubber floor mats, spray them down with a hose, followed by scrubbing them with a good-quality cleanser. Laundry detergent can be used to good effect in these cases, and is equally useful in cleaning carpeted floor mats. It is important to avoid bleach-based cleansers, however, as automotive carpet is not always color fast when it comes to cleaning with bleach cleansers.
After you have removed the floor mats, vacuum up any dirt or debris from the floor that is loose, making certain that you sweep underneath the seats and between the seats and the center console. This will allow you to remove dirt and sand from the nap of the carpet in the next step.
Use a bristled brush such as a nylon scrubbing brush, to lift the carpet’s nap and loosen any traces of dirt and sand or other debris from between the carpet’s fibers. You might be surprised by just how much debris you will be able to scrub out of the carpet before you’ve even applied a carpet cleanser. Vacuum the carpet once again to remove the debris loosened by the brush.
Apply heavy-duty carpet cleanser at full, undiluted strength to any spots of stain on the carpet, and then use the nylon brush to work the carpet cleanser into the carpeting. It will foam up and turn brown as the stain or spots are removed. You should not expect to be able to remove set-in stains with any cleanser, however. Coffee and other heavy stains will penetrate deeper into the fiber than you can scrub, effectively changing the color of the carpeting in that particular area.
Wipe off the excess cleanser with a clean, wet rag, and then use a carpet cleaner such as you find for rent at grocery stores and home improvement stores to clean and deodorize the remaining carpet. When the water from the cleaner runs off into the catch basin clean, then you know that you have thoroughly cleaned the vehicle’s carpet. It will take anywhere between one and three days for the carpet to dry completely, depending on the severity of the carpet’s soiling.