We all know that when shopping around online for vehicle mats it can become a daunting process. With so many online retailers to choose from, whether it's an independent car mat online retailer like ourselves or the bigger sites like Halfords, Amazon or eBay there is one thing you can be sure of is that their offering will probably be in a different grade/weight of the carpet used.
Whilst shopping online the first thing most do is to compare the product price, but how do we know that the products we are comparing are identical or similar equivalent? I hope by the time you finish reading this blog post you will feel more confident choosing a car mat supplier and have a better understanding of the products you will find available online.
Comparing a product from retailer 'A' against retailer 'B' can be hard at the best of times, but some of the common things to look out for whilst reading through the product descriptions and technical specifications can be found below.
- Does the retailer advertise a 'g/m2' (gram per square metre) value?
- Do they mention the carpet pile height?
- Is looped or hook & look mentioned?
- Does the product main a textured or rubberised coating on the underneath?
These are all common things to way up when shopping for car mats and to help establish if retailer 'A's mats at £21.95 are a better value than retailer 'B's mats at £18.95 for example. So let me explain why each of the points listed above is important and what they mean.
g/m2; This value when provided gives you an indication of the thickness and density of the carpet pile used to manufacture the car mats. Here at Vehicle Mats UK, the cheapest we supply is 600g/m2 looped pile carpet, we consider this to be a good material that is fairly hard-wearing, I have come across car mats on Amazon with a pile weight as low as 350g/m2. Another point to note is that as carpet weight increases it does not necessarily mean that the carpet is 50% thicker if the carpet weights 50% more for example. As quality increased the pile thickness increases meaning the carpet will have a plusher, firmer feel than the entry-level grades.
Pile height; This question kind of goes hand in hand with the above point and my comments too, a good quality carpet that advertises a good pile height should also have a good weight to it.
Looped/hook and loop; This phrase relates to the construction of the carpet, generally, entry-level and lower end grades of carpet are manufactured using this process. There is nothing wrong with it but personally, my only criticism is that it isn't as easy to clean as higher-end carpet available like our Velour/Luxury/Executive or Prestige Car Mats.
Textured backing; If you carpets you are looking at don't have either a granulated/textured or rubberised backing then the mats are most probably not manufactured from automotive-grade carpet, with mats that's don't have the correct backing they can easily move about in your vehicle's footwell and potentially causing an accident if that mat was to become stuck behind the pedals for example.
I'm hoping you have found this article useful, so if you have any further questions about the products we offer then please do get in touch as we would be only too happy to help.
