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].Â
Anyway, tell us about your worst automotive clean-up job?
Image credits: Garbage Time via YouTube screenshot
Years ago we had a 2010 Saturn Outlook and my wife went grocery shopping. Space behind the third row was small, so she flipped half of it down to load the groceries. What she didn’t notice is that a gallon of milk had flipped into the still open other half of the third row. Then that side was folded too, piercing the container.
It was early spring and still sub freezing, but temps rose into the 70s or so a couple of days later and that’s when the smell arrived. She quickly discovered the source in the folded third row – the now half full gallon of curdled milk. The other half gallon was down in the bowels of the back of the SUV.
I disassembled the third row and surrounding plastics and cleaned everything with Odo-Ban. I pulled the leather seat covers back to get to the foam and basically ran a hose over them for a while to flush any remaining gunk. Followed with more Odo-Ban and let them dry in the garage for a while.
I put it all back together a few days later and most, but definitely not all, of the stench was gone. A couple of Christmas tree air fresheners helped until the smell completely abated.
I got to figure out how to get the stench of rotten whale guts out of a Jeep the first time my wife and I took our brand new 2022 Gladiator to the beach. We drove down to the historic lighthouse, then up and down the beach, and then, right when we came over a big dune and started dropping down to the last section of beach we hadn’t explored, I looked off to my left, and what did I see?
There was a dead whale washed up on the beach below. And this is where I made a terrible mistake. Of course, my wife and I wanted to get a picture of it. So of course we drove as close to it as we could. And of course we rolled down the passenger window to take some pictures.
Thirty feet away and directly downwind from 40 tons of rotten whalemeat.
We didn’t get, like, chunks of meat in the truck, or even visible drops of seawater, but I guess that rotten whale oil was in the salt spray, because driving back into town, it smelled so bad I could taste it. The next day, we drove two hours back home with the windows down in 45 degree weather. The worst part was how jealous my dog got, thinking that we had rolled around in the biggest dead stank of all time without including him.
I had a moment of panic thinking that I’d end up having to scrap the Jeep, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared. As soon as we got back from the beach, I took the Gladiator through our local car wash… twice. After that, I took advantage of the great spring weather and left the doors and roof off for most of a week, so sunshine and fresh air could start the cleaning process. I also took it out on the highway a couple of times to blow out the interior. That alone took care of 80% – 90% of the smell issue.
After that, I wiped out the cowl air intake with vinegar and multipurpose cleaner, then changed the cabin air filter. At that point, we were almost odor free, but there was still an undertone of whale funk after it sat in the sun for a while. Finally, I closed the doors and windows, put the heater on recirculate, sprayed a bunch of Ozium inside, and let the truck idle with the heat on full blast for a few hours.
Once the wind blew the Ozium smell back out of the cab, I had my wife get in and give it the sniff test, and she said the new car smell was back. Victory!
(pics in a version of this posted in the Jeep Gladiator Forum)
Dude needs to sue McDonald’s for compensation. Clearly their coffee was too wet.
Second part to Garbage time video just dropped and theres more smells to clear up featuring ‘burning smell’ and more German over-engineering.
I did a volunteer cleanup stint after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. And all that entails.
A family hauler with a decade’s worth of detritus and filth is easily preferable to one where bodies have been baking in ocean water and southern September and October temperatures that need to be recovered, removed, and identified.
The absolute worst cleanup I’ve had to do was driving home from Disneyland with the two little grand kids when one got sick and threw up. The smell was horrible, and it was so bad it made the other child follow suit. I don’t know what Disney puts in their junk food, but lord it came out converted to the foulest smell you can image.
As soon as I could get to an exit, I got a blanket out of the trunk and just covered it all. The stench was down but it was a rough ride home. Next day I opened the door, pulled the blanket and the smell about knocked me down.
Had a mobile detailer come by and he refused the job. Finally found a shop that would do it. The seats were ok, but they said they would never fully get the stench out of the carpet, so had them replace it. Probably didn’t really have to pull the carpet, but I just couldn’t face smelling it at all.
I love Wade’s Garbage Time channel (he’s most famous for his DankPods channel). I highly suggest anyone to subscribe to his channel on Floatplane, it’s cheap as chips and highly entertaining (He’s been actively trying to kill a Proton beater car by using Pepsi as coolant, and most recently Nutella and paraffin wax as an oil substitute).
*Bleep*ing mice. First one got into the heat exchanger and died, which was loads of fun to clean up since the only way to get at it without tearing apart the entire dash is to reach up through the blower motor mount and around a corner.
Then, after some work was done on the car (*bleep*ing deer too), apparently they cut a hole in the back of the glove box to get access to something and didn’t plug it. Mice built themselves a nice little house right in the glove box and I still haven’t been able to get that completely cleaned up. I’m probably going to have to disassemble part of the dash to get rid of all the dried piss and turds they left behind.
Nothing compared to any of these other stories, but I was leasing a Honda Fit once upon a time for commuting. My dad wanted to start commuting together (we worked at the same place), so we would switch up who’s car we would drive.
Now, to give you an idea of how my dad acts with his cars, he truly sees them as a means to get to work and not to necessarily clean incredibly well. All of his daily drivers are normally filled with grease stains, oil stains (from his side gig of working on A/C units), remnants of fast food, and MANY empty or half full plastic water bottles. Normally the car has a bit of a smell.
I generally keep my cars’ interiors nice and clean, as I see my cars as more than a means of transportation.
Imagine my surprise when my Fit started to smell. Middle of an Arizona summer, and over a few weeks, the smell became more and more horrifying. I had to find out why. Welp, when my dad was grabbing his lunch out of the back seat, a fresh peach rolled out and landed at the base of the front seat. It sat in the heat and started to rot. When I found it, it was a black mass that hardly resembled anything that had ever been edible at one point.
Fun fact, the shape of the peach (or what it had morphed into) never came out of the plastic floor mats. There is still a round spot for the next owner of the car to figure out. The funny part of this story is that my dad thought I had taken his peach! Eventually, thanks to Adam’s Polishes odor neutralizer, the smell eventually disappeared.