Taking care of your car dashboard and interior trim

The dashboard is the face of your car interior, and requires quite a bit of care. A typical dashboard and other parts of the trim (console, doors, etc) are made of plastics, leather, vinyl and rubber. A daily dust up using lint-less fabric cloth can keep dust levels to a minimum, though a thorough cleaning is necessary once or twice a year.

A thorough clean-up starts with dusting and vacuuming the surfaces. Use a cleaner fluid and a microfiber cloth to wipe the surfaces; do take care not to directly spray the fluid on to the surfaces. Small brushes and cotton swabs should be used to clean hard to reach spots such as air-conditioner vents or the areas around small buttons and steering stalks. Coating these surfaces with the relevant protector fluids is a good way of ensuring that they look good and are protected from damage later.

Seat belts need to be cleaned, too, to ensure that your shirt isn’t stained with a diagonal, vertical strip of dirt upon use after a long gap. The best way to clean the belts is to pull out the whole belt and clean it with a cloth dampened with cleaning fluid from the top down, and then left to dry. Take care that the belt does not become tangled as it can get damaged.

Using a UV protector on the dashboard and door plastics can help protect them from cracking up or getting discoloured due to prolonged exposure to sunlight.

TIP: The bottomline of keeping the interiors of a car clean (seats, rooflining, carpets, dashboard, etc) is to keep the windows up and do not allow outside muck and dust to enter the cabin. Also, having the outside air intake vent open in metropolitan cities is disastrous due to too much pollution!