ok i left my car for 2 weeks at my parents house... it has been raining there... when i left i noticed a slight amount of moisture inside of the car on the windows and such but didnt think much of it. i came back to the most horrifying thing i have ever seen in a car!!!!! the entire interior is COVERED IN MOLD...i want to throw up! mold everywhere in 2 weeks!!! the history of this car is that it had an engine fire before i bought it and when i got it the interior had fire-extinguisher dust on it... i used a wet rag to wipe it down... maybe that stuff promotes mold i dont know. anyway, ive had the car for 6 months and not a problem or bad smell. now i leaev it for 2 weeks and this happens????? i couldnt believe my eyes! please help if you have any suggestions at all or just look at the pics and vomit in disgust.


what could have caused this....how do i get rid of it w/out ruining the interior.... and how can i prevent it from ever happening again????? i have never in my life seen something like this happen!!!!! im gonna puke, heath

 

 

holy **** dude....thats horrible My best guess is to get a quality interior cleaner and just wipe it all off. i have no idea how it actually GREW in your car though.....damn.

 

steam cleaner is your friend.....

 

straight out of a nightmare

 

Did you ever take into consideration that maybe your parents may have left the windows down and realized they're down after a nice rain and put them up? That's the only thing I can think of, ewww. Sorry man, that's got to suck

 

nope... car doesnt run, and the battery is dead so the windows couldnt have been down. the only thing i changed was the sunroof to glass and i just noticed thta the seal has some holes in it... i dont see how this alone could have caused it because it had a car cover on it

 

ouch. Time to Lysol I guess.

 

Start with a good cleaner. I don't know about the carpets, those will be the hardest thing to get clean.

That's awful, man. There MUST have been a significant amount of moisture allowed in the car.....

 

thats cool man. your gonna have a heck of a time cleaning that. good luck.

 

Reminds of the time I slept with a cheap hooker.

 

I think it was the wet rag.

Your are going to have to rip the whole interior out to get rid of all of the mold. Take every piece out and clean it with a mild bleach solution. Make sure that everything is dry before you put it back in the car.

Man I feel for you, that looks totally disgusting.

 

heath this isnt so bad

Now this will force you to take apart the entire interior and clean every piece of dust and mold off. It will be cleaner than ever because of this so maybe its a good thing. You gotta take every little piece out and clean one by one perfect and put it back nicely. Id say its at least 25 hours of work. Spread it out...took me 10 hours to clean my interior and the car was immaculate already. I just wanted to condition the seats so I took them out and I cleaned the carpets real real well and removed the doorpanels to get all the dust from inside of them. Took me a full week of scrubin.

BTW I say its the tiny holes in your seal of the moonroof that caused it

 

Which probably trapped any moisture leftover from wiping down the interior inside the car instead of allowing it to evaporate. Cheap car covers aren't worth it. If you're going to cover the car, the cover needs to be able to breath to allow moisture to escape.

After thoroughly cleaning all the interior pieces as others have suggested, you should get a Dri-Z-Air moisture trap to put in the car, and empty it regularly. That will pull the moisture out of the air in the car and help keep this from happening again.

http://www.drytheair.com/xcart/store/customer/home.php

 

It was DEFINITELY the car cover.

But it's not THAT bad. This can be cleaned off, RotorMotor. I'd start by pulling the seats out.

Mold is fairly harmless to your skin, but try not to sit in the car and continuously breathe it.

 

I am an attorney that handles cases involving mold in homes. Any hard surfaces you can clean with a 10% bleach/water solution. The bleach will kill the mold and it won't grow back on the hard surfaces. Unfortunately, anything that's cloth is another matter. When carpet in homes has mold on it, you have to get rid of the carpet -- cleaning is not going to correct the problem totally, it may just grow back. However, clothing can sometimes be dry-cleaned to get rid of the mold (sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't). If you can do some type of cleaning on the carpet/cloth items, it might be salvagable.

Another concern I would have with the carpet and any soft materials is that the padding underneath would also have mold on it. If you don't get this taken care of also, the mold will just come back again.

Be sure to have high powered fan/blower hooked up to completely dry out the car.

 

Must agree with Jimlab and others. The wet wipe down, the car cover, the closed windows, maybe extinguisher dust, the glass sunroof, and maybe even the location of the car relative to the sun, the wind, and moisture around the car, all contributed to turning your car into a gigantic rotary powered PETRI DISH. Science Project from Hell, dude! Also, you don't know the prior mold history of the car. That's why TireSmokin7's suggestions are good, as is the Dri-Z-Air moisture trap.

 

time to burn the car

 

wow - probably not what you were expecting to come home to, huh?


Any chance you can turn this in to your insurance company under your comp as an "act of God?"

 

Don't know much about California Civil Law, But might his Homeowners Insurance Policy cover this type of damage. It happened while the car was parked in the garage which is on the premis. Also, he might want to check the Garage for mold in/on the walls. How about his motor-vehicle policy under comprehensive coverage, if any.??

BTW: I'm not an Attorney, but work for one. We hit Ford in late 02 for 225 million.

 

hahahahah again.... it already caught fire once!!! well there goes my 20b project car!

 

act of god..... god must HATE rotaries (and me this weekend).... after finding the mold my mom wanted to take the hard top off of our miata cause she was sorried about mold!! mom and i go to take it off.... mom trips on her shoelace and drops the hardtop on the ground..... brand new HT and now a piece of fiberglass is broken off!!! what a horrible day!! and i dont even have a valentine this year! aahhhh.. time to get out the whiskey.

 

hard top got served as well .... anyone experienced w/ fiberglass repair? cause im not... im trying to use some fiberglass resin bondo but it doesnt seem to be doing hte trick

 

That reminds me of something I saw in a movie....Creep Show I believe....thats terrible man, I am going to go puke now.

 

Let me guess... on behalf of the idiots who drive their SUVs at 80-90 mph on underinflated tires for long periods of time, then roll them after the blow-out because they don't know how to safely steer a car with one blown tire to the side of the road?