How's Our Chrysler Pacifica's Interior Holding Up After 9 Months?
CARS.COM — From food spills to tracked-in dirt and mud, kids can be brutal on a minivan’s interior. After seeing what my own three young kids have done to my family’s minivan (Hint: It isn’t pretty), I was curious to see how our long-term 2017 Chrysler Pacifica’s cabin had held up after nine months of ownership.
Related: Our 2017 Chrysler Pacifica: Still a Family Road-Trip Champ
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Our Pacifica doesn’t see small sticky fingers day in and day out, but Cars.com staff members have put it through the paces of family life with multiple road trips and normal daily driving.
Our 2017 Pacifica is a Touring-L Plus trim level with leather upholstery. It’s typically easier to clean spills on leather than it is cloth coverings, but I was concerned how well some of the other interior trim would fare. While the seats and floor carpeting are black, much of the plastic trim is light gray — even the scuff plates at the doors. The trim looked like it was just begging for a muddy boot to step on it.
There’ve been times that the scuff plates have been a bit dirty, but I’ve been impressed by how well they’ve held up — and clean up — overall. The one for the high-traffic curbside sliding side door shows a bit more wear than the other side, but the driver’s door plate has just light wear with more than 12,000 miles on the van. The cargo-area walls are covered in the same gray plastic, and even though they’ve accumulated some marks near the cargo floor, they’re surprisingly unblemished overall.
The black carpet doesn’t hide some types of grime well, such as beach sand, but if you have young kids, it’s still the right color to get; it’ll hide most tracked-in stains, whether from dirty winter slush or springtime mud.
It’s hard to muster the energy to clean your car when you have kids that seem dead-set on messing it up, but if you make the effort in the Pacifica — or have a favorite full-service carwash that will — the cabin can look good long after you’ve driven off the dealership lot.
