Interior Cloths

Softness with a bit of bite. A dashboard is a mix of soft touch plastic, textured trim and often a gloss insert, so a cloth that's too aggressive marks the delicate bits and one that's too plush just pushes the dust around instead of picking it up.

What works:

• Low lint fibres, because dust shows on a dark dash more than anywhere else in the car.
• A medium weight cloth. Around 300 to 400gsm. Heavy plush cloths hold too much air and skim over dust rather than collecting it.
• A properly finished edge. Edgeless or soft bound, never a stitched hem, since dashboards have more hard edges and gaps to catch on than any panel.

Work dry for dust and lightly damp for anything greasier. If it needs more than that, spray an interior cleaner onto the cloth rather than the dash and use light pressure. The picks at the top of the page are the ones we reach for.

Yes, and it's the one habit worth keeping. Interior surfaces collect body oils, dust and cleaner residue. Exterior cloths pick up road grime, brake dust and whatever came off the wheels, and none of that belongs on a dashboard.

Inside the car it's less strict. The same cloth will do the dash, doors and console all day. The two worth keeping aside are glass, because anything that's touched a dressing will smear a windscreen, and leather, where you don't want plastic dressing transferring onto the seats. Colour coding helps if you've got a few in rotation.

Yes, as long as it's soft and clean. The thing worth understanding is that the cloth isn't what cleans the leather. A leather cleaner and a soft brush do the work, lifting dirt out of the grain and the perforations, and the cloth's job is to take away what's been lifted and dry the surface behind it.

That's why pressure doesn't help. Most factory leather is coated rather than bare, and it's that coating that wears out, so scrubbing at a seat with a dry towel does more harm than any cleaner would. Let the product and the brush do it, then wipe.

A softer cloth suits it best, something that pulls residue up into the fibres rather than pushing it across the surface.

The usual microfibre rules, with one thing that catches interior cloths out.

• Wash them separately from cotton and anything lint heavy.
• Warm water, 30 to 40 degrees.
• A mild liquid detergent, or a microfibre wash like CARPRO MFX.
• No fabric softener or bleach.
• Air dry, or tumble on low.

The interior specific part is timing. Dressings and protectants are built to stay on a surface rather than rinse off, so they set into the fibres far faster than a wash shampoo would. A cloth that's had dressing on it and gone in the basket for a fortnight comes out stiff and it stays that way. Wash them within a day or two of use and they'll keep going for years.