Interior

The interior is in excellent shape.  No rips, tears, holes...  What really impressed me was the how well

the seat fabric and cushions wore over the last 10 years/289K miles. I've driven rental cars that whose cushions seemed more pliant than a cheap hotel's mattress with 1/10th the miles on the clock.  These seats were firm and supportive, albeit a little dirty.  The dirt we can fix.  Cheaply.

Off to the Dollar Store (or maybe Family Dollar, or the Dollar Tree, or Dollar-a-Rama, but not Wal-Mart or Target, around my way I've never seen this product outside of a Dollarish store)  for two of my favorite cleaning products: LA’s Totally Awesome! Cleaner and Bang Bathroom & Shower Cleaner.  A buck a bottle.  

 These products live-up to their Awesome! names. They’re gentle, don’t leave a residue, no harsh smells, no streaks -- just spray wait a minute, and watch crud melt under its Awesome! power.    In under half a hour, the the worst of the surface crud was gone, taking some of the odor with it.

But the smell...  The plastic might have been covered with residual Le Brae levels of tar, but the fabric just soaks in the stink like a sponge.  With no more than a hand-held machine, I went over the seats and some of the carpet, removing sludge that makes used oil look clean.  I used “pet odor” cleaner in hopes what the machine couldn’t pull out would be broken down and be less odoriferous.

After a good scrubbing the car smelt like a freshly cleaned bingo hall -- complex floral notes balanced by the lingering unctuous scent of stale cigarettes (add some bleach undertones to make it smell like a freshly cleaned Catholic bingo hall).  For this my secret weapon: an ozone generator.   Not sure exactly how this works, other than it generates ozone and the ozone scares odors out of existence. Put this in the car for an hour, close the windows and doors, run the fans on recirculate.  The result is a car that smells like the smoking room of a mid-tier hotel.  Not great, but tolerable.

The headliner contains its share of smoke residue, no doubt, but cleaning that up will probably disturb the adhesive holding on the fabric and result in the liner dropping.  For now, we'll leave this alone.