What Was Your Worst Automotive Clean-Up Job? – The Autopian

Plenty of us like to drink coffee in our cars. Indeed, America is the land of the drive-thru coffee outlet, after all. If you happen to suffer a spill, though, you’ll want to clean it up promptly. It might sound obvious, but leaving it to sit is a bad idea.

This video comes to us from a fellow Australian named Garbage Time on YouTube. “I spilled a whole McDonald’s cappuccino in the center console,” says Garbage Time. “Like the whole thing went in there, and not a drop came out.” The natural human response might have been to soak up the worst of it, but that’s not what happened. “As soon as that happened, I just parked the car, and I haven’t driven it since.” Worse, we’re told that was six long months ago.

The video chronicles the cleanup effort of the Mercedes, which unsurprisingly involves pulling much of the vehicle apart. It’s a great look at just how much damage a single cup of coffee can do, and whether that’s something you can even come back from.

Have Mercy

The car in question is a 2006 Mercedes CLS500. Garbage Time bought it for its big V8 engine and its stylish black-on-tan color combination. However, soon after purchasing the car from a used dealer, it revealed a cavalcade of issues. It’s had a water ingress issue since it came into Garbage Time’s ownership, which has led to a nasty smell of its own over time. The surely-rotting coffee stain has only made things worse, “Cause of that water damage, I’ve always wanted to get in behind the interior, see what’s busted, and actually give this thing the clean it deserves,” he explains.

The rear seats are the first to come out, revealing plenty of mold spots underneath, along with some strange potting mix residue. We also see that some of the coffee did leak out of the center console and into the rear carpets. The bonus is that the car had also developed a serious fuel leak out of the top of the tank, as the seal around the left fuel pump carrier had failed. That left a pretty strong gas smell in the cabin on top of all the biological nastiness going on.

When the front seats come out, it’s even uglier. There are big black mold spots growing in the carpet that are clearly not friendly to human health.

You might think that this would be a relatively simple clean-up job that requires mere tenacity and elbow grease. Sadly, that’s not the case. As the disassembly of the interior progresses, the scale of the problem becomes apparent. Simply pulling the carpets and washing them clearly won’t be enough. The luxurious Mercedes has a thick foam layer laying under the carpets, and that foam had soaked up much of the coffee. Since it’s a dense, closed-cell material, it’s pretty impractical to rinse or clean. Whatever it soaks up is kind of forever.

Cleaning of the carpets is handled with a spray-extractor vacuum, which squirts cleaning liquid into the fabric and then sucks the dirty mess back up. It’s slow going, but it seems to do an alright job of cleaning the synthetic fibers. Meanwhile, plenty of F10 veterinary disinfectant spray is used on the carpets and the body of the vehicle to kill off every last mold spore.

As for the foam underlay? Well, that’s apparently the victim in all this. Being largely impossible to clean, the only decision was to try and hack away the worst parts that are impregnated with festy, months-old coffee residue.

It’s a highly imperfect solution, because the foam is molded to fit the body panels of the vehicle. Cutting it away will make the foam and interior carpets fit poorly in the interior. Given how far gone it is, one might hope for junkyard interior parts to show up, but there aren’t a lot of CLS500s out there, let alone specifically in tan.

For a car like this, it’s really hard to see another solution, though. While it’s a nice vehicle, there isn’t a lot of value left in a 2006 CLS500. Buying a new interior from the manufacturer isn’t cheap, if it’s possible at all—so you’re kind of left at the mercy of whatever you can pull from European wrecking yards that sell on eBay and the like. I faced the same problem when I was looking for parts for my own old Mercedes.

The coolest thing in the whole video? It’s not the muck, the mold, or the mire. Instead, Garbage Time shows us how to hack in cupholders from a different model into the original center console. The idea being that having a simple cupholder available would have eliminated the disastrous coffee spill that precipitated this whole mess. Sometimes, 14 ounces of spill prevention is worth many pounds of cure.

It’s hard to call this video a cautionary tale. It’s common sense that if you spill a milk drink in your car, you’re best off cleaning it up as quickly as possible. Leaving it to sit and fester for six months is an obvious recipe for trouble. Still, it’s kind of hilarious seeing just how much work it takes to clean up afterwards. Good fun all round.

[Ed Note: I’m just going to leave this here:

By how much was my life expectancy shortened? It’s unclear. -DT]. 

Anyway, tell us about your worst automotive clean-up job?

Image credits: Garbage Time via YouTube screenshot