If you’ve ever been to the Island of Maui, you’ll know that the only way to get around the island is by car. In preparation for our 8-day trip, I initially booked a minivan through Turo. If you’re not familiar with Turo, it is a car sharing app that allows you to rent vehicles from other users—think of it like Airbnb for cars. As we got closer to the trip, I shopped around a bit and found that I could get a minivan through Hertz Car Rental for almost half the price of what I booked on Turo.

I’ve been plenty happy with using my Meguiar’s Water Magnet Drying Towels (I’ve got like five of them), but I’ve been seeing new types of drying towels on the market that are much larger and are super absorbent. The most popular one that I see is the Chemical Guys Wooly Mammoth Microfiber Drying Towel. The curiosity got the best of me and I ordered one to try out.

Chemical Guys sells a horse hair leather cleaning brush that is used to deep-clean the leather in your car. It gets a ton of extremely good reviews on Amazon, yet personally I found it to be an awful tool. I’ll just get right to the point: the Chemical Guys Leather Cleaning Brush may be good at scrubbing leather clean, but it leaves behind so many hairs behind that it’s not even worth using in the first place.

Lately, there’s been a new kid on the block: the “cyclone” 70/30 microfiber blend wash mitt. I tested out one of the most popular ones on Amazon: the TAKAVU Cyclone Wash Mitt. It comes in a blue/white color scheme and looks practically identical to many of the other ones on the market today.

Once in a while, you come across a product that’s a game-changer in the car care industry. Right now, I’m really impressed with the Autofiber Scrub Ninja, which is used as an interior cleaning tool, but it shines when it comes to cleaning leather. I first heard about this when someone asked for a recommendation for tools to clean leather with. Since then, I’ve been hearing non-stop rave reviews about this product.

When I shopped for car seat protectors for my children’s car seats, there were a ton of choices to choose from on Amazon. Essentially I had two choices to go with: either a quality name brand car seat protector such as the ones from Lusso Gear, or a similar looking one from a no-name brand for costing slightly less. I ended up buying both because I needed multiple car seat protectors, but I also wanted to test these two choices out to see if there was any difference between them.

For a long time now, I’ve been perfectly content washing my car using the commonly used pile-type chenille wash mitts. They’ve worked quite well for me over the years, but now I’m starting to notice some other types of wash mitts being sold that got me interested. So, I purchased a few different kinds to try out. One of them is the INEBIZ Lambswool Wash Mitt. It’s an extra soft wash mitt that is made to be scratch-free and lint-free.

What you use to dry a car with may seem menial and not even be worth discussing, but there really is more to it than just using any ‘ol towel to dry your car. Of course, using any kind of towel will work, but there are some that dry better than others and do it in slightly different ways. One of the first ones that I started using many years ago and that I still use to this day is the Meguiar’s Water Magnet Microfiber Drying Towel.

The MUCAR CDE900 OBD2 Scanner is a nice step-up from your basic code reader if you’re looking for one with a nice touchscreen and options for analytics. For the $50, it’s a good price for an OBD2 code reader. Personally, I wouldn’t fork out the additional $40 for the extra data you can pull from your vehicle unless you truly needed it. I didn’t find the special functions from the add-on particularly useful, but it’s something you might need if you’re trying to diagnose something wrong on your vehicle.