Spring is here (although it’s easy to imagine some of us might not have noticed). This time around, Spring cleaning isn’t just a chore our parents are forcing us to finish before we can go play outside. Now, it’s a way to keep our environment safe and healthy for ourselves and our families.
While you’re deep deep cleaning your Acura – wiping down the dashboard and surfaces with disinfectant wipes and vacuuming the winter salt and grit out of the carpet – here are a couple additional tips to keep the cabin of your Acura looking like new.
Car Cleaning Tips
Take inventory. Our cars have a tendency to attract clutter. Most of it is needed, at least at the time you decided to toss it in the trunk, but not all of it needs to be there year-round. Now is a perfect time to take inventory of everything stashed away in the trunk, cargo area, and door pockets of your car, and decide what needs to stay.
Store your Winter supplies. Getting stuck in an unexpected snow storm without a shovel or ice scraper can be dangerous. But, now that Spring is here, and now that you’ve taken stock of all the odds and ends hitching a ride with you, you can move all of your Winter items to the garage until next year. To make life easier for ‘Future You’, keep the items you know you’ll need again in the future—ice scrapers, extra gloves, hats, and jackets—in a clearly labeled storage container.
Cleaning is great, but what about maintenance? Much like checking your smoke detectors’ batteries whenever you adjust the clocks for the start and end of Daylight Savings Time, Spring cleaning is a great reminder to check and replace some of the regular wear parts on your Acura. You should change your wiper blades every six months. If you’re reasonably comfortable around your car’s engine, now is also a perfect time to check the belts for signs of wear, to check your cabin and engine air filters, and to check all of your fluid levels.
Clean high-touch surfaces. This was always good advice but is doubly important nowadays. The entertainment and climate control console, seatbelts and clasps, door handles and window controls and all the other surfaces you and your passengers may touch should get a thorough cleaning. If you share driving duties, don’t forget to wipe down the steering wheel, gear shift and instrument levers. (or even if you don’t; you already have the cleaner out, why cut corners now?)
Don’t just vacuum. Clean and care! We’re all tempted to just uncap the bottle of bleach and soak down everything in sight. Well, don’t do that. That’d be bad for your Acura’s leather and upholstery, for one. After you’ve taken care to clean both hard and porous surfaces, take the time to properly care for the materials to ensure your Acura’s leather seats and upholstery last as long as its engine. Genuine Acura leather and vinyl cleaner is specifically designed to gently clean both materials, and the OEM protectant will give long-lasting protection after cleaning.
Don’t clean “just” the high-touch surfaces. After a long winter, your car is begging for a cleaning, inside and out. Winter takes a toll, with salt, grime, and road debris finding their way onto every surface and into every nook. A trip to a nearby car wash is a good start toward ridding the undercarriage of your Acura of any leftover road salt but that won’t get it all. Taking the time to spray on and hose off Genuine Acura HondaBrite will leave your wheels, in particular, looking like new.
Looking for a specific product not linked above, or have questions about proper care and maintenance for your Acura? Reach out to the Bernardi Parts Acura customer care experts.