We Tested the Top Car Vacuums Available to Find the Best

We all know how annoying vacuuming your vehicle can be. There always seems to be dirt that won't come up or a few stray Cheez-Its under a seat, just out of reach. Worse yet is trying to accomplish this with a clumsy oversize shop vac or even your home upright vacuum. Good luck!

We set out to find the best car vacuum cleaner available to solve your car-cleaning needs. We lined up a test for the ages, pitting 14 vacuums of varying shapes and sizes against each other on as even a playing field as possible. The tests included noise readings, suction power, ease of disposal, battery life, and of course, how well they suck up different kinds of debris on a floor. Here's what we found.

The Best Car Vacuums

Purchasing a vacuum specially designed for a car is a worthy investment, no matter how often you clean your ride's interior. They're usually lighter and more compact than a standard vacuum and come with attachments that allow you to get in the toughest nooks and crannies. Better yet, once all the Cheerios and beach sand are sucked up, dirt disposal is typically much easier than with larger vacuums.

Note on our floor-mat test: We lined up five different kinds of contaminants: fine sand, Cheerios, crushed-up Cheez-Its, potting soil, and pet hair. Then, in an effort to keep the test uniform and fair, we equipped each vacuum with a crevice attachment—whether built in or included separately. Because it's the most popular attachment to use when vacuuming your vehicle, we felt that it made sense to test them with that exclusively. Also, some of the smaller vacuums come out of the box with small mouth openings, so to test those against ones with larger mouths wouldn't have been fair.

It should be noted, then, when looking at the photo results of the floor-mat tests, that many vacuums came with attachments that would easily handle the larger chunks. While small openings produced higher suction readings, they really struggled against some of the large pieces.

So if you seriously want to cut down on time and effort when it comes to vacuuming out your ride, it's time to pony up some cash for a car vacuum. Some messes demand a more powerful machine, while for others a compact unit will suffice. But either way, it's better than lugging the vacuum out of your hall closet.