Regular clean is enough
Crumbs, dust, sand, dog prints, general clutter. Anything sitting on top of the material.
A car that gets a proper interior detail two or three times a year rarely needs more than this.
A regular clean works on the surface — vacuum, wipe, glass, done. A deep clean works on what is inside the material: hot water and solution forced into carpet and upholstery and immediately extracted back out, taking the dissolved grime with it.
The honest test is the palm test. Press your hand flat on the carpet and drag it a foot. If your palm comes up gray, the dirt is on the surface and a vacuum will get it. If your palm stays clean but the carpet still looks flat and dull, the dirt is in the fibre and only extraction will move it.
This is the single most searched question we see and the one most likely to get you sold something you do not need. Here is the version with no sales in it.
Carpet and seat fabric are not flat surfaces. They are thousands of loops of fibre standing up off a backing, and dirt migrates down between them until it is sitting below the level a vacuum head can reach. Suction pulls from the top. Below a certain depth, it simply is not pulling on that particle any more.
Worse, a lot of what makes an old interior look tired is not loose dirt at all. It is oils from skin, sunscreen, spilled drinks and food that have soaked into the fibre and dried there. That is a chemical problem, not a suction problem. No vacuum in existence removes it, which is why a car can be vacuumed weekly and still look gray.
Extraction solves both. Solution goes in hot, breaks the bond between the soil and the fibre, and a vacuum head immediately pulls the liquid back out before it can wick down into the padding. The important half is the pulling back out — a machine that only sprays is a way to grow mould under your carpet, not a way to clean it.
Four honest signals. If none of them apply to your car, the standard interior detail is the right call and you should not be talked into more.
Crumbs, dust, sand, dog prints, general clutter. Anything sitting on top of the material.
A car that gets a proper interior detail two or three times a year rarely needs more than this.
Visible stains, a color difference between the footwell and the rest of the carpet, or a car where the carpet has gone uniformly gray and matte.
Also: any spill involving sugar, dairy or protein. Those feed bacteria and become a smell problem later.
Smell that comes back a day after cleaning. That means the source is still in the car, usually under a carpet or in the seat foam.
Cleaning the surface and spraying a fragrance buys you 48 hours. See the odor guide.
Hair woven into the weave rather than lying on it. Pull at the carpet with a fingernail; if hair comes up in a mat, it is embedded.
This is its own add-on because it is its own hour of work.
Anything that soaked through to the floor — a leaking car seat, a spilled bottle that went unnoticed, flood water.
Cleaning the top of the seat when the problem is under it is money for nothing.
Genuinely: a lot of cars do not. If the interior is tidy and the carpets are clean under the mats, book the standard interior detail and spend the difference on the paint.
Extraction is priced per area or per seat rather than as a flat package, so a single stained footwell does not get charged like a whole-car job.
| Add-on | Sedan | Midsize SUV | Large SUV / truck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carpet extraction (per area) | $25 | $25 | $25 |
| Seat extraction (per seat) | $25 | $25 | $25 |
| Extraction cap (either) | $125 | $125 | $175 |
| Pet hair removal | $75 | $100 | $100 |
| Odor treatment | $50 | $50 | $50 |
Add-ons sit on top of the interior detail base of $229 / $250 / $300. Nothing on this list is charged without you agreeing to it first.
The part most pages leave out, because it is the part that costs a sale.
Extraction puts water into your car. A good extractor pulls almost all of it straight back out, but the fabric is still damp when we finish, and in this city that matters more than it does in a dry climate.
In the Sunset or the Richmond in the fog, or anywhere in the city in winter, a heavily extracted interior can want most of a day with the windows cracked to finish drying. We plan around that: extraction jobs get booked earlier in the day where we can, and we will tell you if the forecast argues for moving the date.
If you park in a garage, that is an advantage here — a closed garage is warmer and stiller than a street spot and dries an interior faster than an exposed kerb in the outer neighborhoods.
Three photos — driver's footwell, back seat, boot — tell us in ten seconds what this page takes a thousand words to explain. We will tell you which of these you actually need, including if the answer is none of them.
That costs nothing and there is no obligation attached to it.
More short answers live on the FAQ.
The services this guide is about:
Back to the full guide library.
Three photos and we will tell you whether you need the deep clean or just the detail. We would rather sell you the smaller job and have you come back.