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
My Fiero continues to produce cigarette butts. The interior has been pulled it has no center consol, carpets, or dashboard. It has been vacuumed multiple times. This weekend I found another one. I think the seat cushioning was replaced with butts over years and I will spend the rest of my ownership continuing to find them. Not the nastiest cleanup, but the never-ending nature of it makes it the worst.
The mystery sticky brown substance in the passenger footwell of the ’98 Cavalier we had just bought.
Tuff Stuff did nothing to it. We had to freeze it with ice packs and scoop it out of the carpet with a metal spoon (which we threw away).
I had my Tracker parked at my dad’s house for one summer, can’t remember the exact reason why. As it was at his place, he was using it for various tasks (No problem). One of those tasks, was hauling garbage to the local transfer station (Problem). One of the bags he hauled was filled with crab and clam shells from a seafood boil he must have done. Crab juice doesn’t come out of carpet.
I just yoinked out the cargo area carpet and never looked back. Good thing too, because I’ve hauled some of the worst shit back there.
Ah, same car, my stepbrother left a bottle of white wine under my passenger seat, that I had no idea about. Over the course of a summer it slowly leaked into the carpet. When I discovered it, a nice fuzzy patch of mold had bloomed. Actually wasn’t too bad to deal with, rented a rug doctor and did the whole car.
My daughter was born in the front passenger seat of our 1999 Subaru Forester.
In a previous career I was a paramedic. One day we got a call for a leg injury. Frequently what we’re called for is only the tip of the ice burg. In this case, the guy had broken his leg a month ago. He went to the hospital and was given a boot to wear. Since then, he had not taken the boot off and had not washed or showered at all (he had some serious learning disabilities). We transported him to a different hospital (didn’t like the first one). After we dropped off the patient, my noob partner informed me that there was an unknown “liquid” and maggots coming out of the boot, and it had gotten all over the leg mechanism of the cot. The smell in the truck took about 90 minutes to make kinda tolerable using industrial cleaners. However the “liquid” on the cot took much longer to clean out (so many nooks and crannies!). Long enough that the hospital had time to decide that the patient really should go to the original hospital, so we got to transport him again.
I thought my partner was going to cry.
To anyone who has to clean up a nasty mess I’ll say this:
Industrial strength probiotic (living) enzyme cleaner is your new best friend.
Also vinegar, hot water, borax, woolite, and a good wet/dry vacuum. Bleach too but use with discretion as it’s highly corrosive and will obviously bleach many fabrics.
When my daughter projectile vomited up deviled eggs in the minivan. I cringe just thinking about it.
This one is more symbolic than some of these horror stories.
My grandfather, born in 1913, never drank a drop of alcohol his entire life. He went to some sort of Lutheran summer camp in his youth, took an oath to abstain, and stuck to it for the rest of his life.
Fast forward to later in his golden years. The family move him and my grandmother into assisted living, and while the family took care of wrapping up the household, I took on the task of going over his last car, a mid 90s Saturn SL1 (with manual transmission) before passing it on to a cousin.
One night, I took the car over to a friend’s house to watch football. On the way I stopped at a package store and grabbed a six-pack of whatever beer I was drinking at the time, and placed it in the passenger footwell. En route, I took a turn a bit too quickly, the six-pack tipped over, and as the bottles fell out of the carrier, one got dinged, knocking the cap off and emptying its contents all over the footwell.
No amount of wet/dry vacuuming and scrubbing and air freshening (I was too lazy to disassemble the interior to take out the carpet and foam) ever eliminated the stale beer smell my cousin dealt with for the next few years until she graduated from law school and got a real car.
I didn’t actually complete the job (as in clean and return to service), but when I was a Volkswagen tech, a customer brought in their brand-new Atlas from a long road trip to Florida and back to Georgia. Their complaint? The car was growing mushrooms. I read and re-read the repair order. Mushrooms? Nah, that’s silly. But, sure as shit, in the passenger footwell were tiny mushrooms growing from the carpet.
Absolutely perplexed at the mycological phenomenon that occurred within this new vehicle, I opened a support ticket with VW corporate. They told me to strip the carpet out of the car and look around where the ‘shrooms were growing to find a culprit. I removed the gargantuan center console and found the evaporator drain hose was kinked from improper installation and was overfilling over the airbag control module and into the passenger compartment. This, among other situations I suspect, led to a 10,000 unit recall for inspection and replacement of the drain hose.
As for the car, VW was determined to return it to service. I had to strip all of the interior of the vehicle and inspect the wire harness. It was covered with a cloth loom protector and had become absolutely impregnated with fungus. I was tasked initially with attempting to spray a bleach-water solution in the vehicle to clean it. There must have been discussions with the owner, dealership, and VW because after a few treatments of climbing through a bare husk of a car with a mask and rubber gloves on spraying bleach water, I was told to stop work and put all the pieces in the car; VW was buying it back, presumably to crush it. I had to install the driver seat and shifter mechanism to actually drive the car but packed all the other stuff in the back. The Game of Thrones episode with the public shaming of Cersei had come on recently, so I printed the SHAME meme and taped it to the offending tube prominently displayed for any VW personnel to find.
When I was in high school I worked restaurants with my best friend. One night during service, our chef sent him out to pick up a bunch of tilapia fillets from somewhere, and bring them back. He did so, not realizing that one fell out, and slid under his passenger seat. It was a Celica, and a week or so later, he gave me a ride and that thing was NOT smelling good. (I had no idea about the fish pickup at this point.) I was like, “Dude, something in your car stinks.” and he was like, “Yeah, I have no idea where that’s coming from, I think I ran over a skunk or something.” and he spent the better part of two weeks cleaning the underbody of his car trying to find where the smell was coming from. Finally he tore apart the interior and took out the passenger seat, where he found that rotting piece of fish tucked in/under the carpet. That car never smelled right again afterwards.
I got two, one dumb that gave me a lot of work, and one from a catastrophic incident that was super easy to deal with.
The catastrophic one was a fire on my old-ish VW T1.5, back when I lived in Brazil. The thing caught fire on a bridge (I’ve told this tale here a few times), the entire interior reeked of ashes and related by-products. We salvaged the car, by replacing the engine and repainting the body. I removed the bench seats (upholstered in vinyl), washed and hosed them, and that was it. I replaced the rubber mats, hosed down the interior of the body, scrubbed the crevices and that was it, good as new. Granted, the car was kinda crappy when new, but still, 100% recovered from the fire.
The dumb one start with two French bulldogs that needed a ride to the vet, and one of them saw fit to pee on the middle row of my minivan, where I keep them secured with a harness and a seat belt adapter. Good news is that the harness prevented them from peeing on the floor. Bad news is, well, dog pee everywhere in the seat.
Those dogs weren’t first time offenders, and I knew from experience that the smell would not go away if I try to scrub the seats in place, so I contemplated the mountain of work I had before me. Had to remove the middle row, de-upholster it and wash everything, and then re-upholster it. No online manuals for that, so I had to learn on the fly. I soaked the compact foam from the seats on a bathtub, don’t remember how many cycles it took for me to deem them clean. Just for good measure, I plopped them into a washing machine, and one of the foam bases cracked in the middle due to the spin. A bother to glue back again, but at least I was SURE there was no more dog piss in there.
This leads me to a mini-rant. Why on heavens are car seats/interiors this vulnerable to liquids? I can accept that a Ikea sofa isn’t built with washing in mind, they are kind of disposable, but cars? It seems that the more expensive they are, the less repairable! And they are often the most expensive thing we’ll ever own, how come things like a medium-sized dog, drunk people vomit, forgotten groceries or even a rogue cup of coffee can basically destroy the interior?
Cars should have simpler, more repairable interiors. I don’t need foam and fabric on the floors, but if they have to do it, will kill them to make it waterproof? We’re sacks of 70% water after all, lots of things can come out on the carpets/seats. Having vinyl seats might be a step too far, but I refuse to believe that aren’t other ways to make seats waterproof (or at least water resistant and/or washable).
Thankfully the dog didn’t destroy my car, but that was a close call. Now I ride with waterproof covers when I have to transport them, but if something as catastrophic as this ever happens, I guess I’ll have to create a custom-made waterproof upholstery myself.
I had to pick up my now-ex-wife from a night out with the girls. I’d deliberately decided to use my immaculate mk1 MR2 so I wouldn’t have to give any of her dreadful friends a lift.
After a few minutes of drunk women trying to get in the “back seat” of a mid-engined car we were finally on our way home. Maybe two miles later she announced she was going to be sick, so I pull over, she opens the door leans out and throws up.
However it turns out that she’s thrown up not on to the pavement, but into the door pocket.
I don’t miss her at all.
Just ask me how to get bloodstains out of a cloth seat. No, really, go ahead. Ask me. The secret is cornmeal and brushing against the grain.
The tricky part is keeping your mouth shut. To get blood off of plastic trim, polish it with talcum powder or powdered milk. This isn’t the most marketable job skill, but to get bloodstains out of cloth headliner, put on a paste of cornstarch and cold water. This will work just as well to get blood out of a trunk, a mattress or a davenport. The trick is to forget how fast these things can happen. Suicides. Accidents. Crimes of passion. Just concentrate on the stain until your memory of the event that caused it is completely erased along with it.
Cornmeal and brushing against the grain eh?
Thanks. That will come in handy someday.
Maybe so but knowing how to get blood stains out is good to know regardless.
I didnt have to clean it up, as it wasnt my car, but…….
Back in the late 80s me and some buddies were out drinking 1 night, and decided to go play golf the next day. Well, back then, Goldschlager was popular. At the end of the night, they dropped me off at my place, and they took the highway to get home themselves.
My buddy had a 77 Grand Prix, so we could easily get 4 guys in the car, and 4 sets of clubs in the trunk. He pulled up, and I threw my clubs in the truck, and hopped into the backseat. As we were driving to the course Im noticing all kinds of gold flecks all over the backseat.
So I said “hey whats up with the gold back here?”
“Ahhh, thats from Scott (another buddy who was drinking and playing golf with us) who was trying to stick his head out the window and puke as I was doing 70mph down the extension on the way home last night”….
He got most of it cleaned up, but those gold flakes get everywhere!!
Personally, I bought an 04 Mazda 3 sedan that a lady blew up the engine so had to replace that. She was a chain smoker (and had a car seat in there, so God bless that child’s lungs and future) who left all her empty boxes under the seats, along with butts. Headliner was a solid brown when it should have been gray. Spent a weekend scrubbing it back to looking mostly right. Seats and floor all came out and got steam cleaned.
The other nastiest car was my buddies Focus. He would literally use the back seats as a trash can. Kid lived in the fast food line. Bags of mostly eaten food would be thrown on top of older bags of mostly eaten food. Only times he would clean it out were when the piles started overflowing from the full back seat to the fronts. I was present one time when he had the (very occasional) clean out and there literally were stalks of things growing up from the floorboards along with mold and French fries spot welded to the carpet.
I once left a bag of formally frozen bones for my dog on the back floor of my Volvo 850R, for a week, at the start of summer. I drove around for a week with the window open, lamenting that a rat or something must have died in the vents, until I finally had a reason to look in the back and saw that bag of death on the floor. Handily, the delightfully sensible people at Volvo had seen fit to use plastic-backed floor mats through the car, so I could simply lift the mat out with the offending rank-sack and plonk the whole lot into a nearby dumpster. No nastiness had leaked onto the actual carpet, so I got away with that one.
Pack of ground beef never made into the cooler on a weekend camp. Leaked into the carpet and padding.
Was quite the drive home.
Good thing? it was a rental
Bad thing? The rental office was in the lobby where I worked, so they saw me go by everyday and gave me the look.
I lease out cars for a living to companies.
One of my companies got a new CEO.
The new CEO go excited by the CEO car allowance and ordered a new ‘look at me’ Mercedes to go with his new ‘I’m the boss’ job. (that was a bit of a saga in itself)
In the first month of ownership he and his head of sales take a drive to do a customer visit.
They pulled into a gas station and got two big coffees to go and put them in the centre console of the CEO’s ‘look at me’ Mercedes.
As they pull out of the gas station the auto emergency brakes gets freaked out by
the traffic around them and slammed on the brakes.
Being a Mercedes the brakes are very powerful and they came to a stop very quickly…quicker than the coffee which went all over the dashboard, the windscreen, and the passengers.
Beware of liquids and auto emergency braking.
Ventured far out of the city one weekend and got lost at night. I ended up dumping a metro into an irrigation drainage pool. Water poured in and I got out of there but without my phone. It was a long night wandering through cornfields and cattle pastures. Couldn’t find the car the day after but farmer did a week later and pulled it out. The coolest cop called me up and said come get your car.
The water line was just below the dash so got lucky since the ecm and most electrics reside above that. But I held back puking after a look inside.
Wasn’t that bad of a cleanup since it was just a Geo Metro, just the entire interior, some electrical, some mechanical stuff got swapped out. Couldn’t believe I got that car rolling again but for only another 20k miles. Rust and corrosion got to bad.
Vomited in my mates Subaru GL 4wd Wagon drivers retractable seatbelt.
The fist winter with my 04 Maxima, I left an unopened can of Dr. Pepper in the cup holder. That night it got down to about 10, and the pop froze, exploding the top and showering the interior. Fortunately, I was able to get most of it cleaned up while it was still frozen.
The worst was a car that I bought from my neighbor that was not only a smokers car, but had also sat outside in Houston for several years missing a window. So it had cigarette smoke stink in addition to heavy mold growth. I pulled the whole interior and cleaned and disinfected everything – the inside of the plastic trim pieces was the worst. I got the mold under control and managed to get the cigarette stink mostly gone, but the carpet and seat fabric was permanently stained and discolored. Luckily, the car was super cheap and it somehow ran great even after sitting for five years, so the interior looking dingy (but clean) wasn’t a big deal for being a daily commuting beater.
Worst happened to my parents when moving from the Midwest to the East Coast. My parents always had a chest freezer full of food. When they moved, they loaded the freezer in our full size van for the drive, since the moving van was going to take up to a week. The top couldn’t really open all the way in the van, so everything was put in cardboard boxes to load in and out of the freezer. When we got to New Jersey, we unloaded all the boxes out of the freezer so that the freezer could be unloaded from the van (it was way too heavy otherwise). We dropped the freezer and food at a friend’s house so it could be plugged into. We then didn’t drive the van for a few days since we were in a hotel and waiting to get into our new house and had another car. When we came back to the van a few days later, we quickly realized that one of the boxes of meat had gotten mixed up with other boxes in the van during the unload and was left behind and leaking. It was summer so the car was getting quite hot inside. If you’ve ever smelled death, that’s what it smelled like inside. We cleaned and cleaned that carpet and it was OK for the most part, but every summer, when it got hot enough, you’d get a slight smell of death from that rotten meat. Yuck.
Ah, yeah, anything dairy-based will do that. Only if it’d been just black coffee then it might possibly be okay even after sitting for so long.
In the 1990s Ford undertook a R & D program with using recycled plastic nearly exclusively made from milk jugs but they dropped the program because they found that if they used the recycled plastic in interiors they would get pervasive and unpleasant smells of old milk, especially on hot days, no matter how they processed the milk jugs. Egad.
I’ll follow up in discord with pics, but I absolutely resuscitated a poor Mazdaspeed3 for a person I don’t like just because I love that car and it deserved better. I took the upholstery off the cushions, I stripped all the fabric out, I threw out every rotten carpet pad and literally hosed the console down (outside the car, I’m not pressure washing interiors for YouTube views). Rotten coffees, rusted out canned food, unspeakable filth and mold.