TESTED

048 www.fastcar.co.uk #398

Tested by Midge

The Product…Again, this general-use cleaner, or to give it it’s full name, Chipex Factory Finish Interior and Dashboard Cleaner (phew), isn’t your run-of-the-mill slap-on dressing. Not by any stretch of the imagination. The idea here is that the formula, concocted by their in-house chemist (who’s also a Fellow of The Royal Society of Chemists), will chemically dissolve dirt and grime almost instantly, but without the use of solvents, making it safe to use on any interior parts. The really clever bit though, is that it leaves behind a special anti-static coating, to repel dust and help stop dirt sticking in future. Think of it as interior cleaner 2.0. Put simply, it’s the future.

Because of the carefully considered chemical makeup (apparently there’s lots of cationic surfactants and methylisothiazolinone, which is nice), there’s no buffing required to get even the stubborn dirt off. All you need is a simple spray and a quick wipe to remove any excess product. I tested it on my daily driver, which gets shitty approximately every 22 seconds and, being a Nissan, has acres and acres of cheap grey plastic. It did the job rather well too, and a week later (as I write this) the plastic dash and painted centre console are still perfect. Amazingly there’s none of the usual dust or dirt to report.

What’s more, the product is a thin liquid that easily gets itself into all the nooks, and you don’t need to spray a whole load on there either, far less than I did (it always takes a couple of goes to get the pictures right). With that in mind it’s decent value.

As you’d imagine, ‘factory finish’ means this is less of a traditional dressing and more about ‘like-new’ restoration. That’s fine with me though. Many dash shines look good at first but act as little more than a dust magnet after an hour or so.

And finally, it smells good, which doesn’t sound like much of a point, but it is important. Very often you expect the white-coated scientific buffs to get the chemicals spot-on to make their products work immaculately. But some have been known to forget real-world stuff like not making the product smell like the blue shite you get in a Glastonbury porta-potty. Luckily, with this one there’s no nasty chemical whiffs. Just a clean ‘new car’ smell. I can’t fault it at all. In a nutshell: The appliance of science, properly clever stuff.

Midge’s Verdict

After spending a small fortune (and, quite literally an age) on laboratory development, the guys at Chipex have launched some rather clever car-care products.

Now, you’ll already know that Chipex are the biggest name in touch-up paint for just about every motor on the road. But what’s important here is that they’ve taken their intimate knowledge of chemistry and used it to develop three new items that seem to push the envelope with regards to what can be achieved. In short, they’re no ordinary products.

Take the Aquaphobic Screenwash for example, a single one-litre bottle of this stuff can be used to make up to 80 litres of screenwash engineered on a molecular level to coat your screen and actively repel water. Then there’s the Uber Super Concentrate Car Shampoo, which has a dilution ratio of 1:400. That means spending 13 quid on a 500ml bottle gets you 200 litres (or 20 full buckets) of hardcore, grime-busting suds.

Both are pretty hard to test in a magazine of course, especially with a hosepipe ban on and not having more buckets than your local B&Q. But the point is, what they’re doing here is creating the next generation of extremely wallet-friendly, ludicrously clever car care products. The pinnacle of technology. And there’s one in their range that we can test right away – this rather special interior cleaner.

CHIPEX

PRICE: £12.95

www.chipex.co.uk

INTERIOR CLEANER

FC398 Tested.jt3.indd 48 06/07/2018 10:57