What are the most important features in choosing car or truck floor mats? It really depends on what type of protection you need for your vehicle’s floor, what style fits your taste and how much you want to spend.
Many new vehicles come standard with floor mats made of a carpet material. Replacement floor mats come in a variety of materials, some very similar to the original equipment. Lloyd Mats Ultimats for example are similar in texture to original floor mats, but are made in a heavier, denser carpet construction.
There are many choices of materials and textures available in automotive carpet mats. And as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. If you’re strictly looking for low price, “Universal” floor mats are the cheapest, lowest in quality and fit. Just as the name implies, they aren’t designed for any particular vehicle shape or size. They provide some basic coverage, but will not protect the entire floor. The face materials are low quality fibers, sometimes woven, but often just “flocked” or glued to the backing. Be careful about the ability of these to stay in place. Without mechanical anchoring devices, these mats even with “nibs” or “spikes” on the back, have a tendency to move and can be dangerous.
Custom fit car floor mats usually use better quality materials. Synthetic yarns of Nylon or Polypropylene offer the best wear and stain resistance. There is a difference in products within these categories. “Staple” yarns have fibers created in short lengths of 7 to 8 inches, blended together to form yarn that can be tufted into a carpet backing. Continuous filament nylon yarn is extruded as one long strand, then woven into the backing. You can have “bulk” and density with staple yarns, but they suffer from pilling, or fuzzing. So you will need to vacuum more often to keep them looking good. Continuous filament yarns don’t suffer from the fuzzing and provide much greater wear characteristics.
Lloyd Mats uses continuous filament nylon in several of its carpet mat products. In addition, Lloyd uses a technique of twisting and heat setting, which gives the yarn a “memory”, creating a stronger denser carpet face. Multiple strands of yarn, twisted and heat set is called “plied”. Lloyd Mats Ultimats and LUXE are two-ply construction. Berber 2 has a unique yarn engineering that actually creates a six-ply construction, creating the longest wearing berber style carpet face in the automotive floor mat industry.
Automobile floor mats come in many carpet face styles, like multi-ply cut pile, singles cut pile, loop and berber. Any of these can provide the protection you want for your floor, as long as the product starts with quality materials and the construction is engineered for the demands of automotive use.
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