Interior Protection for Wauwatosa, Wisconsin

From our shop

About 35 minutes

Price

Quoted

Applied

After a detail

Target

Driver's seat, console

The front-half problem

Family vehicles wear from the back. Shift vehicles wear from the front, in the driver's seat and the console, because that is where breakfast on the way in and dinner on the way home happen. The seat base takes crumbs and drips; the seat bolster takes the getting in and out in scrubs or workwear; the console and cupholders take coffee that has been topped up for months.

Protection on a shift vehicle goes where the wear is: the driver's seat, the driver's door card, and the passenger seat where the bag lives. The rear cabin can usually wait.

Coffee on cloth, coffee on leather

Coffee on unprotected cloth wicks into the foam within seconds and, being tannin, stains as it dries. On sealed cloth it beads long enough to be dabbed at a red light. Coffee on unprotected leather sits in the topcoat's grain and darkens it over time; on coated leather it sits on the coating and wipes.

The console is a different surface — hard plastic and rubber — and it gets a protectant that makes sticky residue release rather than bond, so the cupholders come clean with a wipe rather than a scrape.

The bolster

The driver's entry bolster on a shift vehicle takes abrasion twice a day from clothing that is rougher than office wear. On cloth it pills and wears through; on leather the topcoat abrades and eventually cracks. A leather coating on that bolster specifically takes the abrasion in place of the topcoat, and it is the single most cost-effective thing we do on these vehicles.

Applied after an interior detail, on a clean surface, around the rota. Reapplied annually on the driver's side, less often elsewhere.