See all Motoring AdviceThe nights are drawing out and the temperature is getting warmer – yes, spring is on the way, thankfully heralding the end of winter. But if you’ve been using your car a lot to get about in the murkiest months, then it won’t be looking its best, outside or in. Here are our tips on how to give it a proper spring clean.
Give it a wash
Right, this might seem obvious, but we mean really go to town on it – not just rub the bodywork down slightly in a desultory fashion. Use all of your varied, specialist cleaning products: foam the body before you wash it to lift off impurities and grit; get a bespoke car shampoo for the main clean; use the ‘two-bucket method’ (one with your shampoo solution in it, one with fresh, clean water to rinse out your sponge or cleaning cloth); give it a coat of wax once it is clean and dry; use window cleaning fluid to get the glass sparkling; treat the wheels with tyre black and special alloy cleaner. In essence, apply thorough elbow grease in cleaning the car as comprehensively as you can.
Don’t forget the hard-to-reach places
The above information applies to the obvious areas you can see, such as the car’s glasshouse, its body panels, its lights and its wheels. But after autumn and winter, various types of grime and muck can accumulate in places which aren’t so exposed. For example, falling leaves can clog up your vehicle’s air vents at the base of the windscreen, or get into drainage channels designed to funnel away water. The rubber door seals can also trap dirt in them, while the area under the bonnet becomes a dirt-encrusted no-go zone. Same for the wheel arches and sills, and if you allow dirt to accumulate here then rust will inevitably become a problem in the future. Therefore, get into all these nooks and crannies as best you can and clean them all out.
Go to town on the interior
The comprehensive nature of our exterior cleaning advice applies to the car’s cabin as well. It’s not good simply vacuuming the floor mats and seat squabs and calling it a day. You need to dust all the main surfaces, give the insides of the glass a wipe down with a proper cleaning fluid, get a damp cloth and clean the seats and steering wheel, and generally ensure the passenger compartment looks like it did when the car was first in the showroom as a new vehicle.
There are various hacks that can help with this process – for example, it’s said that using an old, soft paintbrush (clean, obviously, not caked in paint) or an artist’s brush can help with the tricky-to-dust air vents, while you can remove the carpet mats, treat them with a bit of household carpet-cleaning solution and then maybe even sling them in the washing machine for a full cycle to bring them back to their absolute best. One weird tip is that shaving foam applied and then wiped off the windscreen can apparently stop it steaming up as easily in poor weather, although you will need to reapply the foam from time to time to preserve this treatment’s efficacy.
Check the car’s consumables – and replace if necessary
By consumables, we mean items designed to wear down and be replaced on a regular basis. This includes wiper blades, tyres, air filters, fuel filters, oil filters and cabin filters. Obviously, checking some of these will require a fair degree of mechanical knowledge, so if you haven’t got that then take the car into a reputable garage for a spring ‘health check’. Tyres, though, and wiper blades are easy enough to inspect, to see if they’re worn or cracked. The latter will almost ‘tell’ you when they’re due for replacement, because if they’re smearing your screen or juddering frightfully when in operation, they’re almost certainly at the end of their life. One more tip here, though: wipe rubbing alcohol on the blades before you bin them, then try them again. If they sweep smoothly, quietly and streak-free, then you won’t need to replace them just yet.
Consider a service
A step on from the above is just to have the car serviced after winter, even if it’s not ‘on schedule’ (in terms of time or distance) to be looked at. Obviously, this will incur expense, but it’s a great way of making the car feel better after the hard slog it has been through during winter.
Get professional detailing and/or paint protection
Again, one that needs a bit of financial outlay, but if you’re not great at cleaning a car’s bodywork and interior (and we get it – we find it a bit of a faff, if we’re honest), then there are companies which can go even further with the post-winter clean-up operation on your vehicle – including machine-polishing the panels and clay-barring the paint to get rid of impurities such as road tar and residual bird droppings. Once you’ve had your car detailed, you’re best off then having its paintwork protected to make sure it keeps its shine and lustre for longer. These treatments include things like ceramic coatings and invisible paintwork-protection films being applied, but they can run to thousands of euros if you go for the top-end packages. That investment might be worth it if you have an expensive sports car or a classic, but perhaps not so much on a 15-year-old hatchback that’s done 160,000km-plus.
That pine-fresh scent…
In-car air fresheners might seem dated, and there’s also the problem that they can sometimes be too overpowering in smell or simply not pleasant either – there are some sickly-scented ones out there, so try and avoid them. However, get a good freshener and your car’s cabin will seem much more pleasant, every time you get in it, as we head into spring. There are the traditional ones which hang over the interior mirror and will only last a few months, but there are also variations that are like those domestic plug-in fresheners of the past; these in-car units slot into the air vents and waft pleasant smells into your face when you use the vehicle’s heating and ventilation system.