If there’s one thing we know about things inside containers, it’s how they can end up outside their containers in a particularly aggravating fashion. When this happens inside a car, some not-so-funny stuff can happen, from big detailing bills to mechanical damage to irreversible psychological harm. Today on Autopian Asks, we’re talking about the worst stuff you’ve spilled inside a car.
If you’ve been following my ramblings for a while, you’ll know that I’m particular about my cars. I don’t let anyone eat in them or drink anything other than water in them, which means I don’t have many spill stories. However, this doesn’t mean I’ve always been a clean freak, but rather that I’ve learned from my mistakes the hard way.
If you ask a mechanically-savvy car enthusiast what the most pungent thing is inside any car, they’d probably say gear oil. This heavy, sulphur-enriched lubricant serves up a Desert Storm-tier nasal assault, and it’s one fluid you definitely don’t want to spill inside your car. Well, back in secondary school, I had to run my old diff oil to the proper recycling facility, which means two bottles ended up in my Crown Victoria. You can probably guess where this is going.
If you’ve never been inside the trunk of a Crown Victoria, it’s roughly the size of the Sydney Opera House. Commodious enough for three or four former associates, it’s not an environment conducive to holding one-liter plastic bottles soundly in place. In my head, the rear footwell’s rubber mat seemed to be a more appropriate place for temporary gear oil bottle transport, but I failed to account for one thing — cheap one-liter plastic bottles have a habit of leaking, particularly when they’re re-used to transport used fluid. Naturally, you can imagine my face when, while driving along, I was smacked across the face with a smell best described as that of robot excrement. Yep, I ended up with gear oil spilled all over the carpets of my Crown Victoria. Well, at least the air-con didn’t work, so the incoming summer would be windows-down.
Another category of fluid that’s not good to spill in a car is anything that goes bad with time. Say, milk, for example. I want to apologize in advance to my parents for sharing this story, and make it abundantly clear that this wasn’t their fault, but simply something that happened to them. I remember years ago, arriving home, only to find that a gallon of milk had leaked, drenching the trunk carpet of their then-late-model Hyundai Sonata. Needless to say, work happened quickly, pulling the carpet and sopping up any residual milk pooling in the trunk floor with paper towels. However, that trunk carpet stayed out of the car for a very long time. Not good, people. Not good.
So, what’s the worst thing you’ve spilled inside a car? Did inducing motion sickness in a passenger by telling them to “watch this” result in a tsunami of vomit sloshing around your all-weather floor liner? Did an evasive maneuver decant your coffee directly into your electronic shifter, requiring some serious repair work? Did you have a glitter incident? Whatever the case is, we’d love to hear it in the comments below.
[Ed note: Wanna read more about Thomas’ Crown Vic? You just passed the link! – Pete]
(Photo credits: Thomas Hundal)
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Our car club does a chili cook-off almost every October.
It was this event that taught me that the crock pot lid is not chili-tight or on-ramp rated. I’ve since learned to place it in a plastic tote.
#KevinMalonesworldfamous
Dropped a milkshake in our 2007 Odyssey. It bounced on the floor just high enough to spew chocolate shake into the DVD player on the center column. No amount of cleaning/fiddling would make that thing work again. I had to find a new one on ebay and replace it (young kids and road trips).
Second hand story, but I know of someone who spilled their St. Bernard’s ashes on the front seat of their new-ish Chrysler 300.
A gallon of purple paint. A friend gave it to me in college after using it. Lid wasn’t secure and I turned too quickly on the way home in my 93 Ford Ranger. Passenger’s seat, floor and door were covered in it from then on. Not great. Not great at all.
Not me, but a friend of mine left a gallon of milk in their car after going grocery shopping. It popped open and onto its side, spilling everything out into the carpeted floor. They didn’t discover it for a couple of days while that milk baked in the New Mexico summer. The smell was still noticeable on warm days when they sold it a couple of years later.
Not so much a spill, but a source of funk nonetheless. I have an old convertible I tend to keep it outside in the summer. It began to stink, and I was afraid that the seals were going bad, water got in after a rain, etc. But it was dry.
After about 2-3 weeks, it was driving me nuts, so I did a full search of the car. Turns out I had a half pound of turkey breast that fell out of a grocery bag in the trunk, and made its way into some hidden crevasse.
Suddenly, I flashed back to 1983, when the same thing happened, but with a container of milk (there’s a pattern here) in the trunk of our Chevy Citation…
Did the same with a rump roast. It stunk it up before I could find it but no seepage so ez clean and aired out
Gallon of acetone. Several times over many years. Thankfully no damage.
I didn’t get it inside the car, but only because a nameless stranger stopped me. I was playing a gig at a crab feed fundraiser, and at the end of the night I started to wheel my gear out through the kitchen. A guy stopped me and pointed at the crab juice on the floor and said, “if you roll your wheels through that and put it in your car you will never the get the smell out.” I took his advice and went out the front door. Thank you, nameless stranger!
Somewhat comforted to see others mention milk haha
I left/missed/forgot an entire gallon of milk in the trunk of my ’05 Legacy Spec B. In the summer.
Not sure how long it actually sat back there…but it was long enough. Took weeks to get that smell out.
Bagels. This doesn’t sound bad, but hear me out.
I had family in visiting for the weekend and had gone (solo) to a bagel place with a drive-through to load up on breakfast hoops.
The shop was quite busy, but I waited in line and got everything on the list. The large paper bag was sitting upright on the passenger seat when I had to stop for a sudden light change at the bottom of a hill.
As I stopped, hands on the wheel, I became aware of the bag slowly tipping forward and sending all of the bagels sliding across the seat and on to the floor.
I was uncharacteristically incandescent with annoyance because the failure was so flapjacking easy to avoid, but I ran headlong into it.
Why didn’t I fold the top of the bag? Why didn’t I turn the bag 90 degrees? Why didn’t I simply keep a hand on the damn thing?? ARRRGH!!
To keep the fun going, I had to go get back in line at the bagel place which by then had sold out of most of the things I wanted.
Yes, it’s the firstest of first-world problems, but knowing that I failed to employ the tiniest bit of forethought that would have avoided the whole mess makes it worse. Good luck cleaning that up.
5 second rule
As a differential mechanic for nearly 40 years, I’m immune to 90W gear oil smell, but try a sniff of BURNT 90W, like what happens when a tooth goes through the back cover of a motorhome, the oil all drains out, and the ancient, hearing-challenged driver just keeps trucking along until the gears turn red and melt together.
I’ve dealt with the aftermath of this more than once. I remember once when a new guy popped the cover and immediately vomited into the drain pan. He was “Chuck” from that time onward, poor bastard.
As for “worst spill”, I remember my little sister spilling half of a carton of Mc Donald’s milk into the vent of my dad’s sparkling new 300SD Mercedes in about 1983, it was the first nice car he ever owned. It stunk on summer days from that point onward until they sold it in ’87 or so. Presumably in the winter, I’d left home by then.
So have you searched for your sister since she was put up for adoption?
My (ex)stepfather placed months old summer garbage in the back of my mom’s pristine 2000s ford explorer. Which then leaked garbage juice and live maggots into all the cracks and crevices of the cargo area. Car was pretty much undriveable until my mom took over the cleanup job and stripped everything that would come out and pressure washed the cargo area. Pretty sure that’s about 25% of why they got divorced.
Personally, a punctured can of fluid film takes the grossness cake, better than garbage/maggot water but still not great.
Not me but the poor guy that bought my son’s PW80.He thought he turned the fuel petcock off but turned it to reserve.When he laid it down inside his CRV it started pouring out and the smell was overpowering.I wonder if he was able to ever get that smell out of his car to this day.
Chocolate milk: I didn’t spill it, but I got to clean it up… Eight or nine years ago I picked up a broken Mk IV GTI from a buddy for close to nothing. One of the buddies he got it from spilled chocolate milk in it, and the car had been closed up for several *months*. Dragged it home, aired out the car for a month or so, then dug into the work (timing belt job plus chain tensioner on the head on a 1.8T). Interior required disassembly, lots of vinegar, carpet cleaning, extraction, etc. to get it to smell relatively normal when finished. Had it been a manual trans car, I’d have kept it, as it was getting to be a rarity–an unmodded, unadulterated GTI. Instead, being an automatic, it was quickly sold once finished and sorted.
On my way home from the laundromat in my 2 year old Dakota Sport Extended cab I got sideswipped by a kid in a Camaro running a red light. As I was returning from lanudry had a bottle of bleach in the back seat, that I didn’t noticed had fallen from it’s spot on the seat to the rear floor board, cracking the lid and leaking bleach all over the rear carpet. Didn’t smell bad, but the carpet was forever ruined, along witht he entire driver’s side of the bed. Even after getting it repaired, the rear tailgate never latched right again.
An entire six-pack of Newcastle Brown Ale. It was left over from a bonfire at Wisconsin Point, and I stuck it in the hatch of the ’85 VW Golf I was borrowing from my dad, and forgot to bring it back in when we got back to campus. The next few nights,, the temperature dropped way below zero, and the beer all froze, blowing out the bottoms of the bottles. (Why it didn’t pop the caps instead, I have no idea.)
About a week later, the temperature got warm enough that I could smell the beer inside the car. I looked in the back, and the six-pack was still there, still in the cardboard holder, but when I tried to lift one out, the bottle slid off the contents, leaving a perfect beer-sicle. It was kind of cool, actually.
I cleaned it up as well as I could, but the trunk liner still smelled like beer on hot days until I got rid of the car. If my dad ever noticed, he never said a word.
Rookie there is no such thing as leftover beer. Or as Bubba J says AA is for quitters.
How did I not know that Thomas has a slammed Crown Vic?! Thanks for that link, Pete.
Used to! Sadly, it gave its last gasp years ago, but I wouldn’t be opposed to building another. Mini-spool, heinously aggressive alignment, thing was the funnest damn $500 car.
Do we mean besides little kings fueled technicolor yawn???
Dog vomited all over the seat and passenger door in my truck. Into the door pocket, and into the door through the hole for the handle. I had to take the door panel off to clean it all up.
Oh that reminds me. My friend had a dog and we were going to his folks for spring break. The dog was a pup so not used to 8 hours drives. Got a bit car sick and puked. I guess it wasn’t too bad since it all ended up on me instead of the interior.
I had the milk thing happen in my ’85 GTi. In my final year of college, I had a 3-6 am radio shift on Friday nights. This not only got me required internship credits but also was a fun gig. On the way home after my shift, I remembered that we were out of milk at home so I stopped for a gallon and perched the jug on my front passenger seat. I was the only one on the road at that hour, until some dumbass inexplicably pulled out right in front of me. I spiked the brakes and avoided the crash, but in the melee the milk jug flew onto the passenger side floor and broke open upon impact. I tried my best to clean up the milk when I got home, but the jute carpet backing had absorbed too much. All summer after that fateful day, the car smelled like sour milk. Dammit!
Milk. I thought I sopped it all up but some of it must have soaked into the carpet and boy could you smell it once the weather warmed up. Thankfully it was a company truck. We never really got the smell completely out, but one of my co-workers totaled it not too long after, so we didn’t have to put up with it for long.
Had a bottle of diesel antigel leak in my semi. That stuff is so noxious it is seriously hazardous to your health if inhaled. Took me hours to clean up the mess and air out the truck. And under bunk storage is the worst place to have a spill. Now antigel rides strapped to the catwalk
A four-quart pot of home-made hot & sour soup.
So. Much Tofu…. 🙁
Mmmmmm – Spicy Chunks!
Milk is a bad thing to spill. Every warm day will remind you of your clumsiness.
Also, I knew more than a few guys in high school and college whose girlfriends puked peach snaps into the front seat of their cars. It seems to have been a habit or a thing back in the late 80s.
My wife and I accidentally flipped two of the biggest Dairy Queen Shakes available in the early 1980s into her Impala carpet.
It cooked for the next 24 hours at about 120 degrees.
The next day after I tore out all factory carpet and replaced it.
Even after wiping the bare floor several times before installing new carpet, it still had a minor smell the next couple years.
Schnapps thank you Hogan’s Heroes