Our interior, magnified!

[~37oZ~]

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to share a little bit of information in regards to the material used in our cars, hoping it will be useful to maybe someone. I own a 40th anniversary and wanted to detail my Z this past weekend so I was searching around forums trying to figure out what our interior material is actually made of. Many seem to believe it’s made of leather for the seats and Alcantara for inserts for the seats and doors.

After many hours or research, I couldn’t find a 100% definite answer with hard evidence or proof of said claims. The reason I wanted to figure this out indefinitely was for the purpose of using the right chemicals for the appropriate material, not wanting to use a nubuck or suede cleaner on Alcantara or vice versa in fear of discoloring or damaging the material.

The actual brand “Alcantara” usually has a visible tag indicating it to be such just like seats have the “SRS” logos to indicate that the vehicle is equipped with such feature. The reason they have this tag on genuine Alcantara equipped car is mainly for prestige but also to authtincate, this was the first “red flag” that made me question the authenticity of our “Alcantara” material.

At first I figure I would stop by a local high end detailing shop here in my city and speak with the owner that has 30+ years detailing countless exotic cars to see if he would know what materials are used in the car. Long story short, he said the leather portion most definitely looks and feels like leather but he would be shocked if Nissan used really genuine leather in a sports car where they are trying very hard to stay competitive from not only a performance level but also a from a price point perspective as well and he also added even his own Lamborghini also isn’t 100% genuine leather either and he felt the same way about this Alcantara material too in my 40th.

He was also the one to tell me about the Alcantara tags. This sounded like a legitimate answer to me and begged the question, “how will I know for sure?” The only answer was to take the material and examine it under a microscope 200x and go from there…

After using a microscope on the leather, it revealed not to be leather at all but a synthetic plastic compound or it seems anyway? The “Alcantara” also was not real Alcantara or nubuck/suede but also a plastic material I believe. So the whole purpose of this post is to shed some light on the topic and hopefully save someone serious cash in premium detailing products! You don’t NEED to opt for that high end leather cleaner/conditioner or that special Alcantara cleaner if you don’t want to as they are simply not necessary and may damage these plastics if the wrong products are used in the long run.

For the faux Alcantara material, a simple solution of woollite and water will work great since it is a plastic fiber material much like many articles of clothing that woollite was originally developed for providing a deep clean to remove body oils and dirt. Using a cleaner designed for the other materials like nubuck or suede can cause the plastic fibers to become stuck together and nappy looking, and can even cause deterioration of the plastic material causing it to lose that fuzzy texture and fading of color.

Also, the same goes for the plastic “leather” conditioner and cleaner made for real leather can possibly also damage this plastic material due to the oils and detergents causing the coloring material on the seat skin to flake or peel over time, even possibly weakening the material allowing it to snag and rip much easier from every day average use and color fade or so I’m told. I’m not sure what you can use for faux leather, maybe a vinyl cleaner possibly? I’ll probably just use a good leather cleaner when I can get it on sale, because I’m not sure if it actually will harms anything, I’m just going off of what the “experts” are saying.

Hopefully I’ve contributed some useful info for everyone which hopefully saves someone some money! Or at least cool magnified pictures of our interior material LOL. Thanks for reading!

As you can see below, no pores that real leather would normally have...






This table below, shows what different genuine leather looks like when magnified like I did with my interior.



This is the faux Alcantara magnified, also what Alcantara, suede and nubuck do not look like when magnified.