A study has found car interiors are "dirtier than the average toilet".
Most people clean the outside of their car on a daily basis - but how often do you clean the inside?
Whatever your answer, it's probably not enough if new research is anything to go by.
Researchers at Aston University swabbed five cars and found more bacteria than the average toilet.
The boot was the worst area with 1,425 bacteria found, while the driver's seat was second with 649.
The steering wheel was the cleanest area, "probably because of the increased use of hand sanitiser".
Perhaps, "most worrying of all", though is the fact that researchers found faecal bacteria in some of the cars...
- Every car studied contained faecal bacteria, such as E.coli , with the highest levels found in the car boot, as well as on the driver's seat
- The gearstick, dashboard and back seat also saw higher levels of bacterial contamination than is found on, or even inside, the average domestic toilet
- The steering wheel was found to be the cleanest area of the car, likely due to the uplift in hand sanitiser use due to the COVID-19 pandemic
- Older cars were revealed to have higher bacteria loads than those that have been on the road for a shorter time
Dr Jonathan cox, senior lecturer at Aston University, said: "With faecal coliforms, in order to get sick, you would have to ingest a fair number of bacteria. It very much depends on the sort of bacteria that you are finding in that particular environment.
"But there is a potential that they could make you ill, particularly if you are immunocompromised for whatever reason or run down, under the weather etc.
"So it's just good to have clean practice in terms of making sure that our hands are clean because it's our hands that tend to touch the food that we eat, making sure that our hands are clean between using a vehicle and then going and consuming a sandwich."
