Daily Pitfalls Your Car Seats Face and How to Stop Them

There are many things that can happen to damage your cars seats; sun, spills and kids rank at the top.

Moisture: When moisture seeps into fabric car seats, it can cause ugly, stinky mold to fester and grow. Leather seats can become tacky to the touch, a sure sign that the leather’s natural oils are being washed away. Moisture is especially a problem in rainy areas such as the Pacific Northwest, but it’s also a problem in many other areas. All over the country, people climb in the car after a swim at the local pool or beach or a kayaking trip. Moisture damages car upholstery. Installing seat covers are your best bet for protecting your original seats. They come in a wide selection of materials, colors, styles, and designs, with different degrees of water resistance to protect your interior.

Spills and grime: Sticky sodas, hot coffee, and milky ice cream cones—nobody means to spill them in the car. Everybody knows you shouldn’t fumble with a cup when you’re going 70 mph on the freeway, yet many of us do it anyway. And what about those to-go specials dripping with hot sauce? Or the generously stuffed burrito gripped in your hand, its wrapping suspiciously wet on the bottom like it’s about to drip? Not just kids with sodas and ice cream cones, but adults with super-size drinks and one-pound hamburgers with the works are continuously threatening the nation’s car upholstery. Add to the ingestibles all the tracked-in dirt, the soiled clothing, and salty sweat, and it’s a wonder your upholstery is intact at all. Form-fitting seat covers can save the day and your car seats by taking the brunt of the grime and spillage.

Kids and Pets: Kids are adorable, especially toddlers, but it’s well known that they are as messy as they are cute. A kid discovering the delights of her first birthday cake is likely to grab it by the fistfuls and smear it all over her body as well as her face. You can easily clean up messes in the kitchen, but what if this were to happen in the back seat of your car? You didn’t anticipate that the cookie with the melting chocolate chips would be used as finger paint with your upholstery as the canvas. Nor did you expect your furry co-pilot to throw up or have diarrhea or leave white lines of slobber on the seat. Not to mention his gift of fur, which turns out to be a nightmare to remove, or the gouges left by his sharp little claws, which prove impossible to repair attractively whether your seats are cloth or leather. However, if you have the right set of seat covers for your car, you can shield your seats from the inevitable messes that children and pets create.

Friction: How many times a month do you and your family get in and out of your car? This may seem like a harmless activity, but it causes a lot of wear on your seats. Like sandpaper on wood, the texture of your clothes rubs against the texture of your seats, whether leather or cloth. As the months pass, the constant friction between bodies and car seats steadily erodes your upholstery. The thickness and resilience of the leather or fabric gradually decrease, and the upholstery becomes threadbare and torn, or the leather becomes thin and splits. This sad fate can easily be avoided with a high-quality set of seat covers.

Ultraviolet light damage: Sunlight may be crucial to every form of life on earth, but too much exposure to the ultraviolet rays of the sun is not healthy for upholstery no more than it is for human skin. UV radiation dries out the oils in leather upholstery and makes it crack. It has a bleaching effect on fabric. An overdose of UV radiation will eventually turn your beautiful sapphire-blue upholstery into a pale ghost of its former elegance, or your snazzy black upholstery into ashen purple. You can’t always find a parking spot in the shade, but you can protect your car seats with a set of attractive seat covers.