Overview
Floor mats are interesting interior components of a car. A clean, freshly vacuumed floor mat can completely change the look and feel of a car’s interior. Just as well, a worn out and tattered carpet mat can make a car seem like it’s been through a lot. I generally get a lot of excitement out of putting a fresh, new floor mat carpet inside of an older vehicle with worn out mats. I’ve done this in three cars now, and each time, the result is a completely refreshed interior experience.
Honda Access Premium – OEM Extended Floormats
The new mats arrived in a compact package, neatly laid over each other, with an instruction manual in the center.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the driver’s side mats
Here, you see the once red-stitched lettering completely gone. I finally peeled it off over a year ago when it was mostly falling off. You see the substantial wear on the mat where many-a-heel have rested, along with what may have been a through-hole at one portion.
One of the coolest features on the new mats that you can’t quite see in this photo is the pattern of the carpet fabric. You can slightly tell in the photo of the passenger mat below, but the new mat has a diagonal weave pattern, so the fabric has a really nice look to it. Along with that, we now have metal place holders on the passenger side as well, for the brackets that come with these mats.
The most-coolest feature on this mat, is without a doubt, the extended portion for both the driver and passenger sides. I still don’t know why Honda designed this significant rectangular hump right into the floor-space of both the driver and passenger sides of the car. However, in any case, the new mat has a second piece to cover that hump, where the original mat simply stopped short of it. The extended piece is very precisely shaped. I was very impressed at the incredibly subtle curves and features built into the molding for this piece of carpet. The sizing of the carpet changes by millimeters in certain areas, while the rectangular portion curves up in certain areas, presumably to carefully match the shape of the S2K’s floorpan. These mats are a quality made product, that’s for sure.
And the passenger side mats:
I’m simply blown away at the quality of the new mats. They don’t just look like new versions of the stock mats, rather they have a very premium feel to them. I also think the silver metal badge looks really cool. Installed, I later found, this looks well in place, next to the silver metal label on the door sill!
Install:
As mentioned, these mats require install of a set of brackets that help keep both pieces of the mat in place. No big deal installing a simple bracket, right? Except that you must cut into the carpet to make space, GASP! It wasn’t so bad as it might seem, as the instruction manual on the mats gives a pretty clear instruction on where to make slits in the carpet to access the mounting location below.
Pictured above, I’m pointing at the yellow mounting plastic grommet for the driver’s side mat. To the right is the standard bracket that keeps the standard mat in place. To the right of that we have the extended bracket which comes out over the chassis hump and has a metal fastener/button to clip the extended portion of the mat into place. The new mat comes with a blue grommet which I didn’t need to install in the driver side, however I did need to install for the passenger side.
Yes, I couldn’t find a proper box-cutter/blade so I ended up using a dull old kitchen knife. My cuts could have been much cleaner & more straight if I had simply found the blade I intended to use before getting started.
Driver Side brackets installed:
Here we are on the passenger side where I did need to install the supplied blue plastic grommets, as the passenger side didn’t have any existing floormat placeholders.
Passenger Side brackets installed:
Driver Side
Before:
After:
The diagonal weave of the carpet is visible here. Legit.
Passenger Side
Before:
After:
Very pleased with how it turned out mA.
AutoZone – ProElite Rubber Floormat Covers
The trouble with upgrading floor mats in an older vehicle, is that floor mats are relatively heavy-wear items. They take quite a beating from consistent use. After all, they support our feet, our shoes, and have our shoes sliding along them while driving time and time again. So it makes sense that they would end up looking worn out quickly, but that’s no fun when you’re installing new mats in an old car. What’s the point of spending $100+ on a new set of mats, when they’re just going to get worn out again, rather quickly at that.
One might suggest, spray the mat with a fabric protector. This will keep it clean and make it easier to clean. Perhaps this is a good suggestion, but in the long term, I expect that it cannot compete with the challenges of dirt, mud, spills, and grime that should not but can end up on the surface of a floor mat. What if you had to give someone a ride on a rainy day? Sometimes it can be tricky to control what ends up on a mat, and sometimes you might just not want to think about it.
For these situations, the ultimate solution, is a mat cover. The down side is, of course, that it takes away quite a bit from the interior’s comfortable feel. It can make a refined interior feel more like something you’d expect in a rugged pickup truck. The simple solution in this case, is to run the rubber mat overlays during rough/wet weather days, and pull them out on a sunny day when you expect good weather and minimal dirt. The cool thing about these mats, that I picked up for about $13 from AutoZone, is that they are super thin. They can easily be laid into the trunk and stowed away while taking up minimal space.
First, I traced the OEM floormats against the rubber ones:
Now snip snip snip:
As you can see, the passenger floor mat is a bit wider than the generic rubber ones. I use some Scotch tape to line up an additional section to match the width of the OE mats here:
And then I use Gorilla tape to lock it into place.
Next tricky part was getting the rubber mats to match the shape of the extended portions of the new mats, with the shape of the chassis hump molded into them. For this I used paper clips on each mat, approximating the shape of the hump, letting them sit on for 15-20 mins at a time to pinch the shape into the rubber mats. They appear to recover their shape pretty quickly, so time will tell how well this method works to shape the rubber mats. Here the left side rubber mat has already been ‘shaped’ by the clips. As you can see it’s already a little round on the edges.
There you have it! Custom fit rubber mats for the S for less than $20 and about an hour or so of careful cutting and shaping. Also slightly visible are the holes I cut into the mats so that they can be held in place by the standard floor mat placeholders. I used a small screwdriver to poke those holes. Nobody likes a squirrely floormat.
Installed! They fit like a glove. Mainly because the HAccess mats also fit like gloves, which I used as a template.
That’s all! If you made it this far, thanks for reading!
—Update 4/24/19
The rubber covers, although good for protection, do not sit well in place. They slide all over the place. It was only a few days in from the time they were installed, that the mounting hole that I had pierced through the rubber simply opened up to the edge of the mat. This pretty much undid the usefulness of the mounting hole, and now the mats slide all over the place, generally ending up beneath the pedals.
For future reference, a hole punch would probably be more effective, providing a smoother round hole, less likely to tear open to the sides. In addition, a round cutout could be lined with Gorilla Tape to help keep its shape and prevent the hole from getting larger.
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