How Do I Remove Car Odor?
 

Hey everyone, I've used up a bottle of Febreeze and Airwick trying to remove this terrible odor from my car, but it doesn't seem to be working...

So here's the story.
Monday afternoon I'm grocery shopping with one of my mom's friends. One of the things I bought was a gallon of ice cream that I bought for my mom, because I know she likes ice cream. On the way back home, I first drop her friend off, then I go to my house. As I'm unloading the groceries I didn't see the ice cream anywhere, so I assumed that her friend must've taken it thinking it was one of her bags.

I don't mount my car again 'til Wednesday evening when I'm going out with a friend, as soon as I enter the car I smell this utterly disgusting, rancid odor...like something had died in my car...but I thought it was me or something, it wasn't until I couldn't stand the smell anymore and my friend got inside that I asked if he smelled it to...I pull the car over...and under my seat is the gallon of icecream, it had mostly already melted and soaked into the carpeting.

I took out the backseat floor mats and soaked the carpetting with Febreeze which alleviated the stench for a while, but it only really seemed to semi-mask it, not remove it. I used a whole can of Air Wick, and that did the same thing, semi-masked the smell for a while, but it's still there....

I didn't know what else to do, and I had some green tea in the car, so I soaked the carpet with a bit of green tea, figured...well maybe my car will smell like green tea, but that's way better than rotten ice cream.


Anyway, I'm not sure what else to do, what sort of perhaps chemical/spray/or thing I can find in my home, that I can use to remove the smell...I thought maybe some of you might know how to remove the odor, so you can give me some advice...it's really a nauseating experience driving my car now.

I'm sure a car detailer could recommend something expensive ;)

Something "baking soda"-based might work, even if you put an open box of it in your car for a while?

ARM & HAMMER® Baking Soda - BASICS - THE MAGIC OF ARM & HAMMER® BAKING SODA

Oh god. That sucks. You should be able to pull the carpet up at least enough that you can clean the shit off of the floorboard. I'd imagine that there's quite a bit of stank butter hanging out there, too.
Good luck!

Even if you address the main problem area, I bet that smell's soaked into every inch of fabric in your car. Probably nothing for that but driving with the windows down for like a month.

I once left a pack of cheese curds in a car, and it smelled up until the day the engine died and the whole thing was scrapped. Those dairy smells are really hard to get rid of. Good luck, though.

I thought about this for a second, I wasn't sure if people used baking soda for non-fridge odor removal...lol, seems like it though, so I'll probably go buy some pretty soon and scrub it into the carpet and seats (why not, like Bob said, other fabric in the car might have absorbed the smell too)


It's an 04 Saturn Vue, not a spectacular car, but I think it's pretty decent.

How do you pull the carpet up? And is it easy to put back down, or will it look like I did some fucked up thing with it? Just asking cause I'm a noob.


I hope you're wrong, but I'll try applying some baking soda, and any "anti-odor" shit I find in the store to the seats and surrounding areas. It's only been 3 days, but my car still smells terrible. It really makes me feel sick being in there too long.

Eesh!

Hopefully, baking soda will work...I've also heard vinegar helps remove odors...
I can't afford anything too expensive. I have about a $20 budget with this odor removing ordeal..lol

A friend of mine had this horrible carcass acid odor that you could taste seeping in through his car and at first, he figured it was just something he hit and might have got stuck to the grill, so he did a full exterior clean down. The problem still persisted so he decided to check the interior and it turned out that it was a package of raw turkey meat that he got from the grocery store a week or so prior and it fell between an empty space in his trunk, so he never knew. Combine rotting meat with the summer sun and you've got a reason to burn the inside of your car.

He took cans of febreeze and jammed the nozzle so they would keep spraying and threw a couple of those in the trunk and left them there. Took him ages to get that odor out. I think he had to eventually replace the trunk fabric lining as the odor stayed in that like a sponge.

(FYI, if you want to fuck someone up with an aroma, put a chicken leg into a jar of milk with the lid just slightly screwed on. The eventual gases will push the lid off and it will smell to the equivalent of death. Themoreyouknow).

I would rent a rug doctor from the grocery store and clean the carpets in the car like you would in a house (they have that hand held attachment thing). They have febreeze soapy stuff that goes in it too. I just now saw your budget is 20 bucks. I bet you can find someone with a steam cleaner.

. . the . . . horror . .

You'll never get it out. You'd need to replace the flooring, and have the rest of the car cleaned out majorly.