Best car interior cleaners

Keeping your car’s interior dirt and dust free can sometimes be overlooked but it’ll make the car much more pleasant to drive and use if the interior is kept clean and fresh. If your cabin cleaning routine involves a damp duster and a cursory once-over with the vacuum cleaner, these specialist cleaning products could be exactly what your car’s interior needs.

Just as using dedicated products on your car’s body panels, glass or trim can yield impressive results, taking the time to use a dedicated spray on interior plastics or muddy carpets can give a lift to a tired or dirty interior.

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We’ve tested four of the best interior cleaning products to see which performs best. We used butter and ground-in chocolate to simulate the worst that a textured interior panel might encounter in real life, before applying each product and following the supplied instructions.

1. Dodo Juice Total Wipe Out review

5

Price: ~ £14Size: 500ml/5 litres as testedRating: 5/5

Don’t be fooled by the wacky name and packaging; this is a serious cleaning product from a company with a good reputation in the car detailing world. We tested the refill concentrate version of the Total Wipe Out cleaner and were impressed by its action on stubborn chocolate and greasy butter. The product consists of a blend of detergents, solvents and cleaning agents and is best applied and left to work before you wipe it off. Diluted to a 10:1 ratio, the refill version can make five litres.

2. Autobrite Direct Citrus Wash review

5

Price: ~ £8Size: 500mlRating: 4.5/5

Autobrite Direct’s cleaner performs just as you’d expect from one of the biggest names in the car care business. As with other products on test, the cleaner can be used on everything from hard surfaces to fabrics, along with plastic trim inside and out. Cleaning power is good, doing well against both chocolate stains and butter. It can also be diluted to make the pack go further, although the product is pretty good value anyway.

3. Gtechniq W5 Citrus All-Purpose Cleaner review

5

Price: ~ £6Size: 500mlRating: 4.5/5

Gtechniq has made quality car cleaning products for a long time, but 2020 marks the first year that it’s made our best car interior cleaners list. Like the Autobrite Direct product in this list, this one is marketed as an all-purpose cleaner, and it has a similarly zingy citrus smell. You can use it on a variety of surfaces, and dilute it to make the bottle go further. We needed to use it neat on the stains we applied but it did a good job of shifting them.

4. CarPlan Demon Clean review

5

Price: ~ £5Size: 1 litreRating: 4.5/5

Striking a great balance between cleaning power and cost, CarPlan’s Demon Clean is a commendable and impressively low-cost choice. The product has a pleasant citrus scent and its spray nozzle distributes widely; it made easy work of our test dirt, doing well against tricky butter and chocolate stains. The product can even be used to clean exterior parts – an extra string in the bow of an already impressive winning product.