Best Car Interior Cleaners for 2023, Tested

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Dirty dashboard? Sticky steering wheel? We tested nine interior cleaners to find the best choice for spiffing up your ride.

When it comes to automotive care, it might be hard to look beyond the products that make your chrome shiny or your paint glitter in the sunlight. After all, that's what people notice first. But what's the point of spending countless hours getting those pesky swirls out if your vehicle's interior is a den of nastiness?

We think interior cleaning is an underrated aspect of car care. Yes, cleaning under your seats and around your cupholders seems daunting, but this is where you spend most of your time, after all. So what kind of interior cleaner do you buy?

To find the best car interior cleaner, we tested nine of the market's top products from brands such as Meguiar's and Chemical Guys. The test included a well-loved (and slightly legendary) 1990 Geo Tracker from a previous beaters challenge, a stick of butter, and more.

So before you apply that elbow grease to your chrome bumpers, don't overlook your vehicle's interior. These cleaners will freshen up steering wheels, dashboards, cupholders, and just about everything in between. Here are our picks for the best car interior cleaners.

This is it—our Best Overall choice. The Total Interior Cleaner & Protectant from Chemical Guys actually cleans all interior surfaces and is safe to use on everything including glass and screens. It's got great strength, too, acing our butter test (see below).

The cleaner also doubles as a protectant, meaning it'll shield your dashboard and other interior components from harmful UV rays. The only knock? We aren't a fan of the scent—it's strong. But if that doesn't bother you, you can't go wrong with this choice.

Also, Chemical Guys just launched a 'wipes' version of their Total Interior Cleaner. While we didn't test it with the rest of these cleaners, it might be worth a try for on-the-go cleaning.

For strong, no-frills cleaning power, look no further than Griot's Garage Interior Cleaner. We chose it as our second-best car interior cleaner for its simplicity and effectiveness. There's no scent, no residue, and its clear color gives us confidence that it won't stain.

Griot's cleaner took off normal grime with ease and smashed our butter test. The 22-ounce bottle is nice too, and will last you awhile. The only hindrances? It doesn't work on screens or glass and lacks any UV protection. But we're willing to sacrifice that for the fantastic cleaning power.

For those of us who want a quick, cheap spray to clean our car's interior, Meguiar's Quik Interior Detailer does the trick. The cleaner works decently—passing our butter test—and left behind neither streaks nor residue.

It's not as strong as other cleaners on this list, and it has a slight scent. But it does feature a protecting agent to keep surfaces looking clean longer. For a cheap, quick interior cleaner, this is the best budget choice.

While this is strictly an interior cleaner test, Carfidant supplied a product that also cleans various exterior parts. (Hey, we like two-in-ones!) The cleaning power is evident—it aced our butter test and cut through existing grime easily.

Carfidant says this stuff can clean exhaust tips, degrease an engine, and remove bugs from your windshield. While we didn't test any of those claims this time, we believe that its strength makes it capable of such tasks. The scent is quite strong, and it's one of the pricier cleaners on our list, but the versatility outshines both issues.

If you need to clean your interior lickety-split, it's tough to beat the speed of these Armor All Cleaning Wipes. This container holds 50 wipes, but we found the pull-through opening tricky to use. For light dirt and grime, these are excellent, but they struggle against real messes and failed our butter test.

The smell is very strong, and they do leave a slight residue behind—which can cling to floating dust, making your cleaning job a waste of time. However, the convenience is unmatched; you'll just compromise the quality provided by more labor-intensive cleaners.

We aren't a fan of cleaner smells, but this one caught us off-guard. The Total Interior Cleaner from Adam's Polishes has a pleasant fruity scent, dubbed Maine Blueberry. It was a nice change from the typical chemical cleaner scents provided by other products on this list.

Aside from the smell, the cleaner features plenty of cleaning strength and protects from UV rays. However, it left behind a slight residue and an uneven finish. We like to think of this stuff as a combo cleaner and air freshener—which isn't a bad pairing.

Aimed toward dress-up jobs as opposed to cleaning duty, this Interior Detailer from Meguiar's might be better for show cars than ordinary rides. It lacks in the strength department and leaves behind a slick, almost-glossy finish. Meguiar's recommends not using this on screens or glass.

Pairing that finish with a strong smell, this cleaner won't be for everyone. But if you're getting your car ready for the Saturday car show, a few spritzes of this will have your interior looking slick.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with Mothers Speed Interior Detailer, we just feel the other sprays do the job better. This stuff boasts solid strength—it passed our butter test and didn't leave any residue behind.

However, it's got a slight cleaner-y odor, and we noticed a few streaky spots after drying. It's not bad, not great. (The sprayer nozzle had a nice spread, for what it's worth.)

We had bad luck with the Car Guys Super Cleaner right off the bat, as the bottle we received had a leaky nozzle. It dripped profusely, making a mess down the side of the bottle and onto our hands. But we shrugged it off and got to cleaning.

It also had a funky smell and seemed to dry slower than others, even after repeated swipes with a dry microfiber cloth. (While Car Guys brands this as another interior/exterior cleaner, we just tested the interior cleaning aspect.) Without any sort of UV protection (sold separately), we'd have to pass on the Super Cleaner.

We wanted a mix of typical grime and simulated messes in our test vehicle for this evaluation. We didn't want to use a new car, so we settled on a semi-legendary 1990 Geo Tracker owned by Car and Driver's very own Dave Beard. He's driven the thing all over the place, and it's accumulated its fair share of interior grubbiness in its three decades of existence. In our eyes, a perfect test mule.

We purchased a large pack of new microfiber cloths for this test to ensure each cleaner had an equal chance to clean. We began by testing each cleaner on a separate section of equally dirty dashboard and door panel and noted how quickly the cleaner cut through the dirt and grime. Other notes included smell, residue, and drying patterns.

After all of the cleaners completed that test, we wiped a chunk of semi-soft butter on the dashboard. We then sprayed this greasy mess with each cleaner, waited 10 seconds, and then applied one even, uniform wipe. We noted how much of the greasy butter was left behind and applied that to our results.

Once the tests were completed, we felt satisfied that each cleaner was judged equally and that the old Geo enjoyed a nice interior spruce-up.

This depends on how much time you spend in your car, what you do in your car, and so on. But a good benchmark is once a month, with a deep clean seasonally. The monthly interior car cleaning can include a quick vacuum, cleaning your dash, vents, screens, and cupholders. For seasonal cleanings, this is when you wash your floor mats, scrub seats, and perform a thorough deep-clean. But each vehicle is different, depending on usage.

Some of them, yes. The cleaner will explicitly state that it's safe on windows, but you should definitely confirm that before trying. Other interior cleaners will leave a finish or residue on your windows, which can be a nightmare to remove. Your best bet is to just use a separate glass cleaner.

Each detailer has a product they prefer, but we've seen many of the cleaners on this list included in detailing buckets. The pros typically stay away from the wipes, but the sprays come down to preference. Even the Car and Driver garage crew can't decide which one they prefer—there's a whole cabinet full of different interior cleaners!

Our test cleaners ranged in price from under $10 up to nearly $25. If you choose one of the sprays, you'll want to invest in some good microfiber cloths too, which can add an extra $5 per handheld cloth.

Car and Driver and its sibling publications at Hearst Autos combine the forces, talent, and knowledge of three of the largest, most influential automotive publications in the world. With these incredible tools at our disposal, we don't have to worry about gaming search engines to get traffic or promoting lousy products just to make a sale. We’re concerned with our legacy, our reputation, and the trust that our readers have in Autoweek, Car and Driver, and Road & Track. We know you rely on us to give it to you straight, and we promise to deliver the truth, every time.

To mirror our values, this test was conducted in an environment that provided equal testing procedures for each product: the Car and Driver garage. We tested each cleaner on typical grime and used a butter test to gauge the strength of each product. We noted this, along with drying patterns, scent, and residue. Upon tallying up our findings, we agreed that our test was fair and legitimate, and provided the best information for us to recommend our picks to you, the reader. In the end, that's what matters most.

Read more about our product testing and evaluation process here.

Collin Morgan is an Associate Commerce Editor at Hearst Autos, where the former Rust Belt mechanic and gadget enthusiast presents the best gear for your automotive endeavors.

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