How to tell if a car has been flooded, before you buy it
We clean car interiors for a living, which means we are the trade a seller would pay to make a flooded car look ordinary. That is an odd thing to put on our own website and it is the reason this page is worth reading.
A deep clean removes everything a buyer notices in the first minute. It does not reach the places water actually settles, because those places are sealed under the carpet, behind the dashboard and beneath the boot floor. So the checks below are the ones a clean cannot answer.
Where to look, in the order worth doing it
- Under the carpet, not the carpet
- Pull the carpet up at the door sill where it tucks under the trim. What matters is the jute padding beneath it, which holds silt and stays damp for weeks after the surface has dried. Press it with your knuckles. A clean car should not be cold and heavy under there.
- The spare wheel well
- The lowest point in the car and the last place anybody cleans before a viewing. Lift the boot floor and look into the corners and the jack recess. Fine grit that will not brush away, or a tide mark around the rim, is the single most reliable thing on this page.
- Seat rails and the seat bolts
- Run a finger along the rail track and look at the threads on the bolts. Those bolts sit inches off the floor and never get wet in ordinary use, so light rust on them belongs to water that was standing in the car.
- Seatbelts, pulled all the way out
- Draw each belt to its full length, including the part that normally lives inside the pillar. A tide line across the webbing, or a section that feels stiffer and grittier than the rest, is water that reached seat height.
- Behind the glovebox and up the bulkhead
- Reach under the dashboard to where the carpet turns up to meet the firewall. Silt gathers in that fold and no extraction machine reaches it, so it survives the clean that removed everything you can see.
- Inside the light housings
- Condensation inside a headlight or a tail light, or a faint horizontal line across the reflector, means water sat outside the car at that height. On its own it can be a perished seal. With anything else on this list it is corroboration.
- Bright marks on screw heads
- Look at the screws holding the sill trims and kick panels. Fresh tool marks on the heads mean the interior has been out of the car recently, and an interior does not come out for a wash.
- Trim that is newer than the car
- Carpet newer than the seats, or mats newer than the carpet, on a car with worn pedals and a shiny steering wheel. Parts do not age at different rates by themselves.
One of these on its own proves very little. A car parked in the rain with a bad door seal will fail the first check and pass the rest. Three of them together, in places that have nothing to do with each other, is water that stood inside the car.
- The pale blocks
- Carpet, seat fabric, trunk floor. A shampoo and an extraction reach all three, which is why a flooded car can look and smell ordinary at a viewing.
- The dark blocks
- The padding under the carpet, the rails and bolts under the seat, the well under the trunk floor. Water goes to all of them, and a cloth presses against them at best.
- Why these are the checks
- Every check on this page is a dark block, or a way of reading how high the dashed line went. None of them is a surface, because the surfaces are the part that gets cleaned.
What a clean hides, and for how long
- A shampoo and extraction
- Buys a few weeks of a clean smelling car. The machine lifts water out of the fabric and leaves the padding sealed underneath it, so the smell returns when the car next sits closed in the heat. That is usually well after the money has moved.
- An ozone treatment
- Removes an odour without touching what caused it. A car treated on Friday will smell of nothing at all on Saturday morning, and nothing about the way it smells tells you what is under the carpet.
- New mats
- The cheapest cover on this list, and the most common. Mats are the part a buyer looks at and the part that costs the least to replace.
- A viewing with the aircon already running
- Cold dry air moving through the cabin for twenty minutes before you arrive will mask a damp carpet completely. Ask for the car to be left shut with the engine off, then open the door yourself.
None of that is dishonest work. It is what we do every week for people whose cars are simply dirty, and it is quick. An interior takes an afternoon, and an afternoon is all it takes to buy a seller one clean viewing. That is why the smell of a car tells you very little and the spare wheel well tells you a great deal.
What this page cannot tell you
Everything above is about the cabin, because the cabin is what we know. Whether the engine drew water in, whether the electronics will fail in a year, and whether any of it is economic to put right are questions for a mechanic, and a car that fails these checks wants one before anybody hands over money.
We do not inspect cars for buyers and we are not offering to. This is what we have learned cleaning them, written down.
If you have already bought one and want the interior dried right out, send us a text and say in it that the car came out of a flood. It changes what the job is.
Related
- Interior & Exterior Detailing the clean this page describes
- Smells and stains what a clean removes
- How often to wash keeping ahead of it