I bought a R52 S used with 5,600 miles on it. The car smells odd, like dogs. Not really a urine smell but definetly some stuff I dont want to continue smelling. How do I clean it? I have read on the NET about baking soda, but white powder on a black carpet does not really sound good. HELP

 

Try putting the baking soda in a pie tin or other container and let it sit on the carpet overnight with all windows rolled up. Better yet, do it every night for a week straight and see if that does the trick. Obviously, remove it in the day time while driving around.

You may want to give Fabreeze a try. Some people have put dryer sheets under their seats to improve the smell.

Tony

 

I picked up a carpet shampoo machine. Its kinda big, but itll work for the larger flat floor portions. The guy who owned it did not get the complementry floor mats, and certainly didnt buy any so I am gonna wsh the foot wells really well.
Do you think the carpet machine would rinse out baking soda? maybe I should spot try it.

 

Vacume up the baking soda first. Bissell makes a pet oder formular u can use also.

 

Vinegar in a bowl left overnight removes Smoke smells...try it...it might work!!

 

Regular white vinegar or the Salad type

 

You should try some of the pet odor removers that contain enzymes. They are good at removing pet urine smell so maybe they would work on doggie smell too

 

It's also possible that your cabin filter has never been replaced and is getting "odiferous".

Oops...just noticed the mileage. Not likely on a low miles car.

 

Try Fabreeze - works wonders.

 

a high end auto upholestry guy told me his secret - a bag of oranges. spread em all around and leave in the car, windows up 24 hours or more. It's working pretty well on the slight smoke odor in my used car.

The wet nasty smell you have could also be a/c - i think i read somewhere that you can blast the stinky germs by running hottest air setting with ac button on - cooking the stinkers!

I have a new cabin air filter on order that I hope will be the coup de grace for my new/old car.

I would try all of the above before the rug/upholestry shampoo. Be sure to suck up *all* the water you possibly can from the car - the machine is too big, make sure you get attachments and just keep sucking up the moisture. A wet interior could cause more problems than your currently harmless stink...

Good luck!

 

I second bamatt's suggestion. An enzymatic cleaner will not only remove the smell but also the source if applied directly. Any local dog shop should carry it along with larger chains and even grocery stores are carrying it now.

Good luck

 

And I'll third it. Nature's Miracle (found at pet stores and places like Target, etc) is amazing on that kind of stuff.

 

White Vinegar...sorry I didn't see your post before now.

 

There's a wonderful product called Odorzout that is all natural. Just sprinkle it on (anything) let sit overnight and vaccum the next day. I've used it on MANY different things and it works great. It will even eliminate skunk odor!
It's not harmful to pets or children.

www.88stink.com

Good Luck!

 

So I think I have VICTORY The spent 7 hours, Cabrio top down cleaning all the plastics with cleaner, used hot soapy w/mild bleach on the seats. (removed them entirely) vacummed EXTENSIVELY, shampooed the carpets, armoralled every peice of plastic. polished the chrome glass cleaner.
The car is clean!!!! NO SMELL!!!!!

 

You are luckier than I. I am trying to un-dog an Audi I recently bought.

The Audi is a 99 wagon so it had many more years to get dirty and smelly than your car. I'm still working out the smell but have had decent success so far. Regular interior cleaning, baking powder, vinegar, febreze, natures miracle - none of it worked. Car still smelled. Especially after sitting in the sun with the windows up.

After a few tries of the above, I wound up yanking up the rear seat cushion to see what it looked like underneath. It was f'in gross. There was about 2" of dog hair and dirt accumulated under there. I nearly lost my cookies. At this point, it was obvious that the source of the odor in the car was all the dog hair and crap that was behind and under the interior panels. So step 0 was to get rid of the odor causing nastiness.

I wound up removing most of the rear interior (seats, trunk side panel coverings, trunk carpet). I vacuumed out the big items with a wet dry vac. There was still tons of dog hair after that so I used some sticky packaging tape wrapped around my finders and around the top of a screw driver to get the hair out of hard to reach corners. I tried to use a lint brush but it was non-sticky after 2 swipes so I continued with the tap since it worked so well.

Once most of the smelly hair stuff was gone, I started dusting and wiping off the grime from the metal and windows and plastics. Mistake. Water on old dog smelling materials was a bad move - just like water on a live dog makes it smell. I used the natures miracle stuff and paper towels to wipe that down. Much better. That natures miracle stuff didn't do anything noticeable wrt getting rid of the smell on the carpets and interior of the car other but it worked well to dust and pick up the small particles.

I let the car sit for a day or two with the windows open after that to air out. Then I sprinkled the arm and hammer pet baking powder in the metal trunk floor and the metal part under the rear seat bottom and the rear carpet; let it sit for a few minutes and then vacuumed that up. That also helped. In the process of doing that I found a bunch more old dog hair and dust/dirt in the seat rails and under the seats as well as in the rear vents under the seats. Had to use the tape trick to pick up the dog hair and then vacuumed again and sprayed down with natures miracle and paper towels to get the last of the dust.

After all that, the car smells pretty normal but the interior is still out since I'm still cleaning it and letting it air out.

I bought some automotive carpet cleaner and thought I'd attack the seats and interior parts next. I first made the mistake of trying to shampoo the parts while they were still in the car. The water on the old dog saturated materials make the car stink again. So I had to remove the seats and try to get the dirt and stench out of them out of the car if I wanted to make any progress. I started hosing the seats down in my driveway and there was so much brown water coming out of the seats that I gave up doing that at home. Once the interior parts (seats and rear carpet) had dried and I had some time, I went to the local self wash car wash so I could use their pressure washer. I hit the seats with the pressure washer for about 5 minutes each. It was a pita to get all the dirt out but the water finally started coming out clear. Then I hit it lightly with the carpet cleaner stuff and sprayed again. Much better now. They are still airing out in the yard.

While I had the trunk apart, I had to remove some of the sound deadener mats in the rear of the trunk as they smelled bad of dog. I guess they just absorbed the smell over time. It wasn't worth trying to clean those so I just pulled them off the wheel well sides and from behind the trunk plastics and tossed them.

In summary, the basic steps were to:
1. First remove the odor causing material - old dog hair, dust and such [by removing the interior so I could reach the material] :(
2. Thoroughly clean and shampoo the affected soft parts (seats and carpet)

The next steps for me is to
1. better clean the headliner. I have already wiped it down with a wet towel and it was filthy. Headliner is tricky since you can't wet it down to much as it will screw up the glue holding it up. It is also soft so you can't brush it. I received a few recommendations to blot it using a good auto cleaner.
2. I think I'm going to try and find a pro that has an extractor re-clean the car hitting the carpet and seats (front and rear) again. I spoke with Richard from showcardetailing this weekend and he recommended I find a detailer with one of those machines.

Hopefully these final two steps will get rid of the remaining smell for good. I probably have 40 hours into cleaning the interior. I wish I had never bought the car as its been more work than I could have ever imagined. I thought I'd just hire a detailer and they'd be able to get the smell out but the one I tried sucked. Even if I had found a good detailer, I could imagine how much $$ I would have spent paying their labor to remove the interior and clean it the way it needed to be to get all the nasty dirt and stuff out.

Hopefully this helps someone in the future. If you are ever looking at a used car that has an odd smell to it (like dog or smoke), run away from it and find another car.

 

I cleaned the headliner in my old car using Griot's Interior Cleaner, a sponge (to blot it around), and MFs to blot it all up. It worked amazingly well, but it was time consuming.