Ah, summer’s finally in the air. That means the toys that I put away for the winter can finally come out to play. Apparently, it also means mistakes I made last year come back to haunt me. I accidentally turned my beloved 2005 Smart Fortwo into a horrible Superfund site of moldy disaster. Here is how I got rid of a ton of forbidden polka dots from my interior.
A couple of weeks ago I found myself cracking open my mini warehouse with the goal of rearranging the vehicles inside. It’s not very wide, but it goes quite deep. Currently, there are six cars, three motorcycles, and too many sets of wheels inside. I ran some calculations and discovered that if I line the cars up just right, I could fit a seventh car. Perfect! I just had to move every car in the unit.
This process actually went pretty well, at first. Even the hardest car to move in the unit–a first-generation Audi TT with a VIN branded as stolen–was able to be bump-started thanks to my workhorse Volkswagen Touareg VR6. This car has a bad starter that I’ve yet to replace. Last year, my neighbor tried to steal it to feed his drug addiction. The bad starter meant that he couldn’t get it going. Instead, he successfully broke into the glovebox and jacked the car’s title and a cheap Gambler 500 ring. Yeah, a hard lesson was learned that day. Don’t leave titles in cars, kids!
Anyway, the “stolen” TT roared to life with a Touareg tug and I moved it to one of my other storage sites. Everything else moved out easily and it wasn’t long until we had just one car to go: my 2005 Smart Fortwo Passion Coupe.
I got this car for free in 2017 when its first owner could no longer register it in his home state. These first-generation cars were never officially sold in the United States. They are among the few cars exempt from the infamous 25-year import rule so long as it’s converted to meet FMVSS. However, while this car is legal on the federal level, not all states will register it. Some state DMVs simply won’t be able to find this car in their systems. That was the issue faced by the first owner, and after fighting Colorado for several years he just gave up and gave the car away. Now it’s in my hands.
I parked the car right before the first snow of winter 2021. This warehouse rearranging day would have been the first day I drove the car this year. But there was a big, toxic problem:
Yuck! Your eyes don’t deceive you, that’s a ton of mold just growing on everything. I ran full-speed and in full shock out of the unit. All of my other cars were shiny and clean, so that was not what I expected.
Thankfully, my fiancée, Sheryl, isn’t just an experienced lawyer but someone who has had to remediate mold more times than she can remember. Her years of helping rental tenants and growing up on a farm are about to help me big time.
Sheryl’s plan involves multiple prongs. The first involves this Bissell Little Green Pro cleaning machine. It injects searing hot water (or a chemical mix) into the surface that you’re cleaning and uses both brushing action and vacuum to get the job done. She combined it with RMR-86 Pro mold remover. The jug of RMR contains one of the active chemicals of bleach, among other harsh stuff.
We also picked up PPE, gloves, and an interior cleaner for non-porous surfaces. Mold wasn’t covering everything, but we were cleaning everything in that interior, anyway.
Sheryl got to work before I could take a true “before” picture, but here is what the situation looked like after she had spent just a few minutes getting into the passenger seat.
The passenger seat looked only slightly less moldy than the driver unit over there.
And check out the mold just dangling off of the steering wheel!
Sheryl made somewhat short work of the mold on the passenger seat. It took several passes and lots of scrubbing, but it took give or take an hour for her to be satisfied with the job.
Take a look! The seat is now even cleaner than it was than before it was parked.
Next came the driver seat, and she said that the growth on it was much worse. The seat bottom in particular required a lot of scrubbing to get through. However, after about two hours even it, too, looked extremely clean.
Next came the dashboard, carpeting, and that horrifying steering wheel. One neat thing about a Smart is that the carpet is easy to pull up. We found that the mold didn’t get too deep into the carpet foam. Sheryl estimates that this is about two, maybe three months of growth. That would make sense as three months ago we were still dealing with below freezing temps in my area.
Before long we had gone through the entire car. The entire gallon of the chemical mix was used up, as well as three gallons of water. But the result was fantastic. The car has never looked cleaner than this inside. Sheryl even managed to put a dent in the giant oil stain on the driver seat. We also gave the HVAC system a good cleaning and just disposed of the floor mats. Those weren’t even worth saving.
With the first treatment done we decided to move the car to one of my outdoor parking areas. There, the interior can dry out under the hot summer sun.
These older Smarts have clear glass roofs that turn the interior into an oven. That’s bad when you’re trying to keep cool in the summer, but perfect for killing stuff.
So, how did this even happen in the first place? When I saw the mold on the seats it hit me that I made a terrible mistake. Last summer I parked the car outside with a car cover on it. The car cover was a little too big, so I thought that I’d make it fit better by closing some of it up in the doors. For some odd reason I thought that this would work. Instead, water trickled in and pooled up in the parts of the cover that was inside of the car.
When I opened the doors to take the car cover off? Oh, gallons of water spilled in. And yet, it never crossed my mind to dry out the interior.
Making matters only worse is the fact that my mini warehouse sits 500 feet some a huge lake, so it’s always humid in there. Yep, a dehumidifier is also on my list!
Sheryl plans on hitting the car with a second and a third treatment, then finishing it off by putting an ozone generator in there for a few hours. Best of all, we’re going to be getting this done for about $300, far less than even the cheapest quote we got from a professional. More work is needed to be done. But for now, it’s nice not to have the car looking like a scene from a horror movie.
Buy a freezer the same size as this storage unit and just start putting your dead cars in there.
That’s what hoarders do with the dead cats they accrue.
This has to be one of the most practical articles that iI’ve seen on any automotive site. Thanks!
We store my wife’s car over the winter and a handful of these get left inside:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WGYN2TD/
Won’t work for gallons of water of wet but if the car is relatively dry when you store it, will keep it dry.
“Mold wasn’t covering everything”, correction, the mold was and still is covering everything, you just can’t see it now.
Having flashbacks to my college ride, a 1985.5 Porsche 944 with the leaky sunroof. That I had to park outside. In a state with a significant amount of annual rainfall.
It was such a disheartening, never-ending cycle. It was never truly mold-free because I’d rarely get more than a week between rains and then the carpet would just be damp all over again.
I still have some fondness for it as a fun/cool/interesting car, but at this point in my life I’ll take a “boring” but problem-free car any day.
OFFTA MAY!
Add this to the list of reasons why I don’t own that many cars. If it’s growing mold, it means it ain’t getting used. Why own something that ain’t getting used? Lots of work to properly maintain a car that ain’t getting used.
Just always leave the windows a tiny bit open. Not enough for bad people to get in to them easily.
I’ve had some of my cars long term storaged for around 20 years, and never had any mold problems. And I live in a quite moist country with a lot of rust on used cars.
Before I learned that trick my interiors would get mouldy in just a couple of months.
The mold will be back anyways.
Once again I am thankful to live in a semi desert where my biggest problem is dust. Granted the interior plastics suffer a bit but as long as I don’t have mice I don’t need hazmat gear. Extra bonus is Oregon doesn’t use road salt. so no rust either.
That looks amazing! Great job! I used to detail cars decades ago when I worked at a car wash near Troy, Michigan. The steam cleaner alone brought back memories. Now I’m inspired to deep clean the interior of my Ranger.
Thanks for the article!
First off, I’m so happy you’re here, Mercedes!
As a fellow weird car hoarder, I haven’t had much trouble with mold, but I’m in a constant battle with mice. I have loads of poison and traps in my storage areas, but they’re pretty robust little varmints. I just pulled a dead one out of my Saab 95 Aero wagon’s HVAC opening this morning after noticing the death smell from the air vent. I had over $1800 in damage done to a C6 Z06 a few years ago, but that was the only real damage to wiring I’ve experienced, knock on wood. Hope you don’t have similar woes, and I second the recommendation for an ozone generator. I got a great one on Amazon for around $80 and it’s been an easy solution to all malodorous issues.
Thank you so much! 🙂
I found some mice damage in one of my cars this spring, but it was one of the ones parked at home, not in storage. Thankfully, I lucked out because the mice seemed to have taken residence in the car’s hood insulation mat and under the engine cover, but nowhere else.
Ozone Generators are great for disinfecting and helping out with lingering smells. Great for getting into the AC, run it 15 minutes with the AC cranked high on recirculating, after you’ve already run it in the car for 30 or 60 minutes sealed and off. Give it 15 minutes or so after it shuts off and you’re left with that weird clean oxygen smell from hospitals.
Yep had a Covette that had a mouse infestation, nothing would get rid of the smell, tossed an ozone machine it it over the long weekend and it smelled sweet afterwards- we had replaced the seats and carpet heater box and cleaned it well beforehand
Careful with Ozone generators, they can break down plastics and ozone is toxic (though itself breaks down rather quickly).