Germaphobes beware, you may want to skip this article and go directly to your car to clean your steering wheel.
That’s because your steering wheel may be four times dirtier than public restroom’s toilet seat, twice as dirty as public elevator buttons, and six times dirtier than a cellphone screen. That’s what comes out of a recent study from the CarRentals.com that looked at the dirtiest parts of driving a car and owning one.
The level of bacteria is of course dependent on how many times you clean your car and what you do inside it. According to the study, however, many people don’t do nearly as much as they should to make sure their vehicle’s interior stays germ-free.
Of the 1,000 drivers surveyed in the study, an impressive 32 percent said they only cleaned their car’s interior once a year. A little over 1 in 10 (12 percent) said they never cleaned their vehicle.
That leads to a scary number of strains of bacteria living in the car. The study points out that over 700 different types of bacteria can end up in your cockpit. Given that 20 percent of drivers said they ate in their vehicle on a regular basis, you can imagine how having that many germs in the car can lead to some problems.
It’s time we all started cleaning our cars regularly, and maybe stop eating inside them. We can’t even imagine how bad things will get when we have autonomous cars. Then we can turn our attention to the fuel pump handle which, again according to CarRental’s study, has 11,000 times more germs than a toilet seat.
It never ends, so make sure you wash your hands.
