Does it feel and look like you live out of your car? Taking the time to clean your car can pose large benefits to both you and your vehicle baby!
You Should Keep Your Car Clean All the Time

If you're like a lot of people, you probably spend a good chunk of your day sitting in the driver's seat of your car. When this is the case, your car tends to start looking like your kitchen, bedroom, laundry room, and garbage can because—who really has time to clean their car all the time? If the inside isn't bad enough, the only bath your car has seen in the last year or two has been those pesky rainy days, right?

Unfortunately, if this scenario sounds a lot like your situation, you may be in for a big surprise. Did you know that keeping your car clean – both inside and out – can help your car's life as well as your own? It's true, I promise! You get regular oil changes and routine maintenance, right? Well, keeping a clean vehicle is just as important as those things.

Don't Let Your Car Corrode and Rust

Winter is coming, and its coming fast which means that salt will soon be on the roads. If you don't already know, the salt on the road in the winter time can eat and corrode the paint and create rust on your vehicle, corroding the undercarriage. This will not only lower the resale value of your vehicle if you ever plan to get rid of it, but it could also cost you a lot in repairs to the car parts that need it.

If you live in a state, like Florida or California, that doesn't experience cold and snowy winters, you may not be worried about the corrosion or rust from salt, but you should be worried about the corrosion from rain. Yes, rain! Most people think that their car is getting clean when it rains out, but the truth is it could be doing more harm than good. The acid in the rain and the rain that is kicked up by the tires from other vehicles on the road can eat your paint, too.

Clean Car Interior Can Improve Your Health

The inside of your car is bound to get dirty with all the food crumbs, water or pop bottles, dirty shoes, papers, clothes and everything else that is thrown about, but this could actually be harming your health. You should regularly:

  • Clean out the garbage
  • Vacuum the seats and floor
  • Dust the dashboard
  • Clean the windows

When these things are not done there are harmful mildews that can grow on the surfaces of your cloth interior, and when you breathe in dust and mold you are harming your lungs. If you breathe in too much of either you could end up in the hospital, which is never a good thing.

A good rule of thumb to follow is to clean your car once a month. It will help reduce the risk of getting sick, but it will also make you feel better. You will no longer feel anxiety next time your co-worker wants to carpool with you to work, or when your friends want to take a shopping trip to the mall and want to ride in your car. Give yourself a break from stress, and clean the car monthly.

Who Keeps Their Cars Cleaner?

There have been multiple studies done by different universities on this question, and they have all come to the conclusion that men have cleaner cars. The results showed that 61% of men claim to clean their car, inside and out, at least once a month while only 46% of females claim to do the same. In the same study, men stated that they feel the outside appearance of the car was more important than the interior, and women were the exact opposite; but 1 in 8 women said they were embarrassed of their vehicle's cleanliness at the time of the study.

Could this be because men are more car-conscious? Could it be their ego and competitiveness of wanting to out-shine (pun intended) their buddies? Regardless of what the reasoning behind it is, it is men that take the trophy for cleanest car. I guess the next time you see a car in the grocery store parking lot that is dirty; it can be safe to assume the owner is a woman, so ladies, clean you vehicle.

As We See It

Man or woman, it's important to keep your vehicle tidy. You could be losing out on valuable resale money, or worse, your health. Taking a few minutes each day to clean out your trash and taking five minutes a week to run your car through the car wash could mean the difference of thousands of dollars at trade in time. If your car is already trashed to the point of no return, sell it for what you can and use the money for a down payment on a new car. Don't think you can get approved because you have bad credit? Think again!

At Auto Credit Express we have been helping customers in poor credit situations find auto financing for over two decades, and we can get you approved in minutes. Get started today with our online car loan application, and you could be driving home in your shiny, and will stay clean, new car tomorrow!