Show me the inside of your car, and I’ll show you your soul. It’s not an age-old insight (I just made it up) but it carries a lot of weight. Though perhaps soul isn’t the right word; maybe dreams is more apt. The state of our interiors says a great deal about our hopes and what’s become of them.
This truth has been cruelly driven home to me over the last few months of our year-long temporary lockdown. When I first got my Mini Cooper Countryman ALL4, I was meticulous in taking care of the inside. I vacuumed. I removed any and all debris immediately. I reveled in its pristine condition. Now, however, it’s littered with old face masks, which have been joined by crumpled fast-food coupons and empty drink containers. My car was once a refuge from the messy, careless nature of life. Now, it is the embodiment of it.
There are levels of disarray. The hoarders are the most extreme. I’m not including people unfortunate enough to be living in their cars in this category. The state of their car’s interiors are not reflections of them but of the twisted values we hold as a society. The hoarders I’m referring to are people who see their car’s insides as if they were a rolling stomach and intestine, designed to absorb matter and crap it out once in a while.
At the opposite extreme are the speckless. Their cars’ interiors are so clean, they’re blinding. Forget new-car smell, these vehicles smell of divine mystic oil, of ambrosia dispersed on the bronze threshold of the Palace of Zeus. Being in the car of one of the speckless is not always a relaxing experience. Expect to be told, “Don’t touch that,” “Put that here,” “Please don’t touch that,” “Finish that before you get in the car” and “Don’t open that in the car” at least once every few minutes.
My Countryman ALL4 is on the low end of clean. It’s cluttered, not filthy, but that’s enough to concern me. This is the vehicle I vowed to keep in pristine condition. Like so many relationships, it had its honeymoon period, and now we’re in for the long haul. A messy car can have fallout in your personal life. A 2020 poll of 2,000 Americans conducted by OnePoll in conjunction with Meguiars, a manufacturer of premium car-care products, found that 51 per cent of respondents would finish a first date early due to a messy car, with 23 per cent admitting they had once ended a relationship due to a partner’s dirty car.
It’s a problem, given that 49 per cent of those polled said they had a messy car and 45 per cent said the prospect of cleaning their car’s interior was overwhelming. The survey ranked the dirtiest parts of the car in the following order: At the top was the floor, then backseat, cup holders, dashboard and finally trunk. Crumbs and empty bottles were the most common kind of detritus.
One reason my car grew more messy is the gradual nature of decay. It happened little by little, wrapper by wrapper, disposable mask by disposable mask until, one day, it was a disaster. Some are philosophical – why clean it if it will only get dirty again? – but I can’t buy that logic. I didn’t purchase the car expecting to one day find myself driving around in a rolling ashbin.
In some parts of Canada, warm weather has already arrived, while for some regions, it’s a glimmer on the horizon. As the sun shines and the days grow longer, it’s time to do some metaphysical spring cleaning. The car seems about as good a place to start as any. Cleanliness is next to godliness, if it starts with the glove compartment.