I Accidentally Turned My Car Into A Moldy Superfund Site. Here’s How I Fixed It

Ah, summer’s finally in the air. That means the toys that I put away for the winter can finally come out to play. Apparently, it also means mistakes I made last year come back to haunt me. I accidentally turned my beloved 2005 Smart Fortwo into a horrible Superfund site of moldy disaster. Here is how I got rid of a ton of forbidden polka dots from my interior.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself cracking open my mini warehouse with the goal of rearranging the vehicles inside. It’s not very wide, but it goes quite deep. Currently, there are six cars, three motorcycles, and too many sets of wheels inside. I ran some calculations and discovered that if I line the cars up just right, I could fit a seventh car. Perfect! I just had to move every car in the unit.

This process actually went pretty well, at first. Even the hardest car to move in the unit–a first-generation Audi TT with a VIN branded as stolen–was able to be bump-started thanks to my workhorse Volkswagen Touareg VR6. This car has a bad starter that I’ve yet to replace. Last year, my neighbor tried to steal it to feed his drug addiction. The bad starter meant that he couldn’t get it going. Instead, he successfully broke into the glovebox and jacked the car’s title and a cheap Gambler 500 ring. Yeah, a hard lesson was learned that day. Don’t leave titles in cars, kids!

Anyway, the “stolen” TT roared to life with a Touareg tug and I moved it to one of my other storage sites. Everything else moved out easily and it wasn’t long until we had just one car to go: my 2005 Smart Fortwo Passion Coupe.

I got this car for free in 2017 when its first owner could no longer register it in his home state. These first-generation cars were never officially sold in the United States. They are among the few cars exempt from the infamous 25-year import rule so long as it’s converted to meet FMVSS. However, while this car is legal on the federal level, not all states will register it. Some state DMVs simply won’t be able to find this car in their systems. That was the issue faced by the first owner, and after fighting Colorado for several years he just gave up and gave the car away. Now it’s in my hands.

I parked the car right before the first snow of winter 2021. This warehouse rearranging day would have been the first day I drove the car this year. But there was a big, toxic problem:

Yuck! Your eyes don’t deceive you, that’s a ton of mold just growing on everything. I ran full-speed and in full shock out of the unit. All of my other cars were shiny and clean, so that was not what I expected.

Thankfully, my fiancée, Sheryl, isn’t just an experienced lawyer but someone who has had to remediate mold more times than she can remember. Her years of helping rental tenants and growing up on a farm are about to help me big time.

Sheryl’s plan involves multiple prongs. The first involves this Bissell Little Green Pro cleaning machine. It injects searing hot water (or a chemical mix) into the surface that you’re cleaning and uses both brushing action and vacuum to get the job done. She combined it with RMR-86 Pro mold remover. The jug of RMR contains one of the active chemicals of bleach, among other harsh stuff.

We also picked up PPE, gloves, and an interior cleaner for non-porous surfaces. Mold wasn’t covering everything, but we were cleaning everything in that interior, anyway.

Sheryl got to work before I could take a true “before” picture, but here is what the situation looked like after she had spent just a few minutes getting into the passenger seat.

The passenger seat looked only slightly less moldy than the driver unit over there.

And check out the mold just dangling off of the steering wheel!

Sheryl made somewhat short work of the mold on the passenger seat. It took several passes and lots of scrubbing, but it took give or take an hour for her to be satisfied with the job.

Take a look! The seat is now even cleaner than it was than before it was parked.

Next came the driver seat, and she said that the growth on it was much worse. The seat bottom in particular required a lot of scrubbing to get through. However, after about two hours even it, too, looked extremely clean.

Next came the dashboard, carpeting, and that horrifying steering wheel. One neat thing about a Smart is that the carpet is easy to pull up. We found that the mold didn’t get too deep into the carpet foam. Sheryl estimates that this is about two, maybe three months of growth. That would make sense as three months ago we were still dealing with below freezing temps in my area.

Before long we had gone through the entire car. The entire gallon of the chemical mix was used up, as well as three gallons of water. But the result was fantastic. The car has never looked cleaner than this inside. Sheryl even managed to put a dent in the giant oil stain on the driver seat. We also gave the HVAC system a good cleaning and just disposed of the floor mats. Those weren’t even worth saving.

With the first treatment done we decided to move the car to one of my outdoor parking areas. There, the interior can dry out under the hot summer sun.

These older Smarts have clear glass roofs that turn the interior into an oven. That’s bad when you’re trying to keep cool in the summer, but perfect for killing stuff.

So, how did this even happen in the first place? When I saw the mold on the seats it hit me that I made a terrible mistake. Last summer I parked the car outside with a car cover on it. The car cover was a little too big, so I thought that I’d make it fit better by closing some of it up in the doors. For some odd reason I thought that this would work. Instead, water trickled in and pooled up in the parts of the cover that was inside of the car.

When I opened the doors to take the car cover off? Oh, gallons of water spilled in. And yet, it never crossed my mind to dry out the interior.

Making matters only worse is the fact that my mini warehouse sits 500 feet some a huge lake, so it’s always humid in there. Yep, a dehumidifier is also on my list!

Sheryl plans on hitting the car with a second and a third treatment, then finishing it off by putting an ozone generator in there for a few hours. Best of all, we’re going to be getting this done for about $300, far less than even the cheapest quote we got from a professional. More work is needed to be done. But for now, it’s nice not to have the car looking like a scene from a horror movie.