Universal Car Mats and why you shouldn't use them?!

I'm sure you've all seem them on popular online sites like eBay or Amazon, on the high street at a car accessory shop, and even in your local supermarket. The trouble is they are popping up all over the place and although they might seem like a good idea and quite often provide a quick answer when looking for cheap car mats, there are several things you should bear in mind.

Firstly, Universal car mats are produced on a basis that one size fits all, in some vehicles they may appear to be a good fit initially you will soon notice that as the mats bed in over time they become more flexible and because they don't have the correct clipping or fixing system they will begin to move around within the footwell.

The second big issue which also comes back to the shape of the mats, because the mats aren't tailored to fit you will more than likely find that the mat is either too big, too small or a mixture of both and fits very poorly within the footwell of your vehicle. A poorly fitting car mat could lead to a serious accident, it is only too easy for the mat to end up out of position whilst driving, either preventing you from depressing any of the pedals within the car completely or once the pedal is depressed that your heel catches on part of the poorly fitting mats.

Another thing to consider is that the main objective of fitting car mats is to protect the inside/carpet of the interior of your car, but when using poorly fitting mats you aren't necessarily covering the sections of floor that come into regular contacts which shoes/boots etc, as well as in the rear where it's quite common to have pets, children which quite often lead to dirty floor areas in the rear.

To give you an idea of the variety and complexity of some mats we have included below some of the different shapes to illustrate that mats vary so much and that a Universal car mat is never going to be a good safe fit for your car.