Had a Grand Tourneo Connect for a year or so now, its sole purpose is bike hauler/camper and I’m not precious about how clean and tidy it is, particularly over winter when we’re slinging muddy bikes in the back and really only in it a few times a month.

Recently its been a bit stinky inside after half an hour or so (once it’s warmed up), but I’ve not had time to clear it out or its been too grim outside to face doing it.

Until this morning. Took half an hour before heading out to rid it of all the junk out of the footwells, under the seats etc.

Oh boy.

Tyred Jr – not famed for his table manners indoors – appears to have done quite a job in the van. Under the passenger seat this morning, among various socks, pairs of sunglasses, numerous Nature Valley/Soreen wrappers, contact lens cases, shoulder numbers, zip ties, small denomination coins, water bottles, tyre levers and apple cores I found:

– a packet of his favourite cheese, not empty. Content not readily identifiable

– a sushi roll

– several decaying carrot batons

Estimated age between 4 and 6 months. Good lord.

What you got?

– a packet of his favourite cheese, not empty. Content not readily identifiable

– a sushi roll

– several decaying carrot batons

Disappointing haul tbh. I was hoping for a murdered hitch hiker you’d forgotten about.

I was once preparing for our annual trip to France and decided to check in the pouches behind the seats. I thrust my hand into the one behind the passenger seat to meet something really slimy, which on closer inspection turned out to be two bananas (or something that had evolved from two bananas……) I estimated they had been there since our last trip to France twelve months previously.

Key for another car which I had given up as lost and paid a locksmith £200 to open and make me a new one.
Really not a happy bunny. I had looked there too!

appears to have done quite a job in the van. Under the passenger seat this morning, among various socks

Not the best places to go for a dump. That might be why it’s a bit stinky.

Best find was a spare window winder that had been underneath the back seat presumably since the car was built in 1978. About 40 years.

Mushed dates and melted chocolate probably the worst. Not too bad by comparison! But wait until this thread gets going, there’s bound to be a long lost amputated limb or two at least.

I once left some fresh fish in a car then left on a business trip to China, remembering 4 days later. The car was in Taipei, 30 ish degrees every day. My then girlfriend was NOT happy about having to sort that one out.

Words & phrases I remember from the follow up phone call included “liquid” “putrefied” “neighbours coming out to look” “in my hair” and it got worse from there on.

Bag of sick…

I can’t beat the fish one but there were a few winegums or similar in the centre console of the Passat (which is flock lined). After it was shut up for a long period of damp weather the sweets eventually dissolved into mold breeding medium and covered the inside of the console and its contents in furry slime. Slightly more worrying is that when cleaning it out I removed the seats (a 5 min job, well worth it if you want to clean a car) and the amount of hidden gunge down the sites of the seat where it previously hadn’t looked too bad is quite alarming. No wonder my family all thought the car smelled.

Dad’s mate decided his car was stinking more than expected for an ex farm vet car stuffed full of every take away wrapper from the last two years*, a selection of wetsuits and filthy shooting gear.

Emptying it out, he found a missing farm cat, everything near it had to be ditched.

*would’ve been more if he had’t needed to empty the front of the car to swap the gearbox

Hit a pheasant once in a works van – seamed the only damage was a cracked grill. Oh well. can’t be helped

It was only at the next service that it became apparent that the pheasant had managed to squeeze itself through that crack and had gone for a ride around the auxiliary belt a few times

Father bought a brand new Triumph Dolomite, in oh, about 1980.

Went in for a first service and to investigate a dreadful smell. Lineworkers decomposing sandwiches were found under the rear passenger seats.

Arriving in the heat of a French summer holiday with a tupperware tub of chunder and one of childs shite to empty and sanitise. Lidded in transit luckily.

The cat still stank after I’d cleaned up my daughter’s copious vomit. Turned out a small pool had seeped beneath the fabric of her car seat, and sat on the plastic base, festering. I had to completely disassemble it and put the whole thing in the bath to soak in detergent.

Back in 1990 when I was an apprentice mechanic carrying out a service on a cortina/granada I found the mummified remains of a cat in the boot, turned out it was the elderly owners cat that had went missing 11 months previously.

Never found anything overly gross as I usually keep my cars as clean as I can but I did have a Fiesta I didn’t care about a decade ago and it lived with the rear seats folded down and used as a bike van. One day I noticed a bit of greenery between the folded seats so decided to tug it free except it wouldn’t budge. Lifting the seats revealed a small tree had set root in the carpet’s layer of mud and had been growing for a while as it was a good foot long! Thinking back the last time the seats were raised was for the MOT 10 months previously and just before a weekend away with the bikes in North Wales. I did the decent thing and removed it but did plant it somewhere nearby in the local park. Last time I checked a few years ago it was doing rather well in it’s new place.

…when cleaning it out I removed the seats (a 5 min job, well worth it if you want to clean a car)…

Makes a massive difference. Just remember to safely disconnect any airbags or pretensioners, made that mistake in an old Corsa I had. The seatbelt yanking mechanism was basically a cap charge in a tube and made one hell of a noise when it went off! Amazingly it could be made safe by using a yellow plastic clip that was attached to the seat rail.

I did the decent thing and removed it but did plant it somewhere nearby in the local park. Last time I checked a few years ago it was doing rather well in it’s new place.

Love that story, has cheered me right up 🙂

Re the seats yes, do check if anyone wants to try this. There’ll be a connector or two under there and one will be for the airbag.

Corpse count so far 2 for 17. Not bad.
Heading for TOTW.
What a lovely counter to the Ukraine thread.

None of my cars have ever got that bad, mainly because I’m always mislaying things, and having to hunt around under seats, etc with a torch, so any unpleasant items would be quickly found.

However, the state many cars were in that I had to deal with when I was with BCA was truly disgusting. The very worst was a repo’d Peugeot that I had to move to dispatch for a driver to take away. The stench when I opened the door was appalling, the only way I can describe it was being like an over-full kitchen waste-bin during a hot summer. There was a pool of water in the driver’s footwell with an apple core dissolving in it, and the rest of the interior was filthy with trash everywhere. I had to open all the windows just to move it 100 metres, I never did see the reaction of the poor sod who came to pick it up! 🤢🤮

Not so much grim, but a few years ago I bought a Range Rover. It had only arrived at the dealer that morning and I wanted it asap so I persuaded them to let me take it as it was without a pdi for a discounted price.
When I got home I found a box of shotgun cartridges and the previous owners shotgun license in the glove box! He was quite grateful to get them back…

My first car was a fiesta, I bought from a friend of a friend for 200 quid.

It had been used to ferry horse gear and feed around.

My first job was to hack out the compacted mud and hay that formed a rock hard layer 10cm deep in every crevice of the boot and around the spare tyre.

The last two posts demonstrate the variables of country life.

The last two posts demonstrate the variables of country life.

There’s a vocal minority on here who think only one of those versions is correct

Luckily it turns out that if you douse fish-juice soaked car carpet in bicarb and vacuum it out every couple of weeks – after two and a half years the smell has almost gone. Until the weather warms up.

I had a ‘bit of an off’ while riding one spring resulting in quite a deep cut but decided to drive home for 3 hours before getting it properly looked at. Washed it out, wrapped a t-shirt to act as padding and tied a coat tight around to compress the t-shirt into the 6-8 inch cut in my lower back and then drove home.

Clearly my TV hero style medical treatment wasn’t quite up to scratch and I lost quite a lot of blood but the t-shirt meant it sort of pooled up so as it soaked into the seat back it only left a small red line. An overnighter in hospital and I was discharged and told not to be so silly and go straight to hospital next time.

Fast forward to the summer and the car started smelling like an abattoir. It got to the point where even I couldn’t stand it and took the car for a professional valet. They ended up removing the front seat cover and the padding for the seat was almost solid with congealed blood. It was a company car so I decided to just replace the seat and return the car without mentioning it.

I read that last post without first looking at the name of the poster. Then it all made sense…😲

As a young wee whippersnapper I got a lift fishing from my mum, I obviously wasn’t that careful putting my fishing tackle in the car as by the time I’d reached the lake and set-up my pint of maggots had somehow become a half pint of maggots. Apparently half a pint of maggots when hidden under the lining of a car boot will happily turn into casters and then into flies in roughly a week and when the car boot is opened the flies will, en masse, take the opportunity to escape in something resembling a biblical plague. I got in a world of trouble for that.

@Hora (remember him, anyone?) once came round to pick something up and brought his new puppy who took advantage of our lawn. Being a responsible dog owner he duly cleaned up, then asked where the bin wax so he could dispose of the bag.

At that time we didn’t have an ourdoor dustbin, the council would just collect bags we left out and sorry, but you aren’t putting that in our kitchen bin.

No, you can put it in the boot of your car to take home and put it in your bin – or just leave it in the car for a couple of months, apparently…

Bought a van at the weekend – propper poopbox.

I’ve spend 2hours cleaning dog hair from in, under and around the passenger seat alone. I’m now gonna buy a new driver seat rather than do the same.

Bonus was finding 70p in change and a Kong dog toy.

I read that last post without first looking at the name of the poster. Then it all made sense…😲

I looked at the name of the poster and had a pretty good impression of how it was going to turn out. I wasn’t totally accurate, it wasn’t an actual human body part, just a decent % of a vital part of the fuelling system.

bought a metro as a gap filler for £100. lots of nasty stuff in the but the worst was a used tampon under the seat. not fun!

Hit a pheasant once in a works van

Met a friend for a ride one day and he’d hit the remains of a rotting road kill pheasant that had made a mess in the rear wheel arch of his car…The smell was pretty grim

And there was me thinking a 1/2lb of stinking Bishop in the glove box one summer was bad enough.

A paper coffee cup that had been used as a spittoon for used snus during the summer in the south of europe (car had no functioning AC, so while it wasn’t used as much as those with AC, that amount of snus (almost a full cup) that had made it’s way into the paper spittoon was utterly revolting.)

The bottom of the cup had also rotted through.

Bonus was finding 70p in change and a Kong dog toy

Are you sure it was a dog toy?

I’m completely the opposite – my car is always clean inside ! That said, my son is a right tramp. Had to clear his coat out some months back – he’d left most of his stuff in it since he went camping in the summer – empty tin of beans, wet clothing – rear seat and foot well was packed with crap. The boot was empty. He can tip a car up in two days – pizza box, crisp packets and 5 bottles of pop thrown on the floor – an not even his car !

One of the companies I worked at regularly rotated the lease cars round the various mangers. One had come back, and been professionally valeted to be passed onto someone else. Except there was an overpowering smell of cleaning products, obviously hiding something – we’d borrowed it to visit a site and everyone was feeling queasy, warm day too. I found a couple of feather’s sticking out of the rear seat….

checks were made, and we’d found out the previous ‘driver’ had been using the boot to put ‘game’ in when he’d been out shooting, so the various fluids had leaked into the car. The valeters had a real hard time cleaning it, hence the smell. We had to off hire the car rather than pass it on it was that bad. Driver got a bollocking, but was then given a nice A4 S-Line Estate – he trashed that too.

We used to clean minibuses weekly at the outdoor centres – everyone from instructor department joined in on a Friday afternoon was the done thing.
At one of my centres back in the 1990’s we discovered a used condom under the drivers seat…
I think full caving suit and rubber gloves was donned to remove that….

ransos

<span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”>The cat still stank after I’d cleaned up my daughter’s copious vomit</span>

This story needs more detail about the cat. Did you use sudocrem to get rid of the smell?

Thank God there isn’t a thread about teenagers bedrooms…..

My son’s room is worse than his cesspit car !