How To Prevent Leather Car Seats From Cracking

Owning a car or truck comes with loads of benefits, but it's also quite a time-consuming and costly endeavor. Routine maintenance is necessary to keep a vehicle running at its best and prevent extensive mechanical issues. In fact, there are things you need to be doing to your car as often as every 1,000 to 3,000 miles. However, this is just the stuff that impacts the inner workings of your automobile and its performance on the road. The interior is a whole other beast that calls for its own set of upkeep tasks.

Opening up your driver and passenger car doors reveals a world of chores. From vacuuming out dirt and debris to changing cabin air filters, there are all kinds of things you need to do inside your car. If you have leather seating, your to-do list grows even more. Even in cars with the most luxurious interiors, it's not uncommon for you to have to repair a tear in a seat or for the leather to start cracking and even peeling. This makes for an overall unsightly car interior. Even worse, reupholstery costs can be rather high. 

Thankfully, seat damage isn't as inevitable as it might seem. If you're worried that your car's leather seats will soon start cracking, here are some steps you can take to prevent this damage from occurring.

The first major step to ensuring your leather seats stay in the best condition for as long as possible is keeping them clean. Frequent use can lead to increased wear and tear, so giving them the proper attention they need on a consistent basis ensures they can handle jam-packed road trips, grocery runs, and all of life's hecticness. If you do live a rather busy, fast-paced life, you'll be delighted to know that cleaning leather seating isn't too demanding of a project time-wise.

To start, you want to vacuum your seats thoroughly, as dirt, rocks, and the like can lead to scratching and tearing once you move on to the next steps. You're now ready to apply leather seat cleaner to your seats. Numerous cleaning product brands offer leather-specific cleaners, so make sure to do some research into the right stuff before spraying any old cleaner on your seats. Alternatively, you could try this homemade leather cleaning solution that'll make leather car seats appear like new. Using a microfiber cloth or a similar cleaning aid, wipe down your seats until they're sufficiently clean. Leather conditioner can then be applied by wiping it into the seats and left to air dry, adding a layer of hydration and protection from cracks.

How often you should condition your seats is largely based on how often they're used, the climate you live in, and individual discretion. As for cleaning, doing so around every two to three months is typically recommended.

If you've given your leather seats a good cleaning and conditioning but you're still not convinced you've done enough to take care of them, there's more you can try. To prevent cracks from appearing in your leather, there are several key precautions you can take — specifically when faced with excessive sunlight. Sun can dry leather out, which results in splitting and peeling, so mitigating its effects on leather seats is important.

One of the simplest things you can do is park in shady areas so the sun is less likely to reach your leather interior. Rolling a window down slightly can also go a long way in the absence of substantial shade. It'll keep the air pressure inside your car equalized and prevent the temperature from reaching damaging levels. Going even further, there are products you can buy to protect your seats from the elements, such as seat covers and windshield sun shades. If you're legally able to do so where you live, you can even have your car windows tinted to block out some amount of sunlight.

Leather cracking is a frustrating reality of having a vehicle with this kind of material inside. So long as you take the necessary steps to keep it as close to pristine as can be, ideally, cracking won't be an issue you have to deal with.