The Greatest Automotive Ground Mats of 2024

How We Tested Car Floor Mats

The good people of GearJunkie don’t mind getting messy outside. And our goal was to do just that, and then climb into our vehicles and see how big of a catastrophe we could make. 

Our Expert Testers

Lead tester Eric Phillips has been an outdoor professional for the last 10 years along with being an extreme automotive enthusiast. At age 18, he built a truck from the ground up alongside his dad and, while living in Chicago, raced cars. Not one to take a vehicle to a mechanic, Phillips picks up a wrench to complete the maintenance and upgrades his own rigs.

He spends ample time exploring far-out locations as a hunter, splitboarder, and landscape photographer — and then brings that dirt back to his vehicles, from working search and rescue to living full-time at 9,000 feet in Colorado. He’s used aftermarket floor mats in all the vehicles he has ever owned. 

Senior Editor Morgan Tilton was a contributing tester.

Our Testing Grounds

This team tested custom-fit and universal-fit floor mats from late winter into spring, or what’s known as “Mud Season,” in the mountain town of Crested Butte, Colo. Almost all the parking spots, including our own, turn to a snowy, muddy mess as the spring sun starts the months-long process of melting winter’s snowpack. 

For this guide, the vehicles included a 2017 Toyota Tacoma Double Cab and a 2014 Ford F-150 Raptor, both of which were used for many muddy adventures. Both were parked on unpaved parking spots that were rarely solid, even, or dry. 

Our Testing Process

Throughout our field tests and personal experience, we determined the best car floor mats based on a variety of metrics including fitment, coverage, durability, ease of cleaning, color, floor grip, foot traction, installation ease, and quality.

Beyond our tests, we also considered the most popular, award-worthy, universal, sustainable, and affordable designs. These car floor mats serve a range of vehicles, styles, and budgets.

Buyer’s Guide: How to Choose Car Floor Mats

Although seemingly simple, an array of details makes car floor mats unique. Take 15 minutes to do your homework before clicking the buy button.

Universal Fit vs. Custom Fit

You can choose two main tiers of aftermarket car floor mats for your vehicle — universal fit, also known as trim-to-fit floor mats and custom fit floor mats.

Universal fit floor mats like the Armor All Weather Defender Floor Mats are often two to three times cheaper and can be tailored to fit almost any vehicle. For older or less popular vehicles, it can be hard to find custom-fit floor mats leaving your only option as universal fit.

These are usually a more flexible, softer rubber that bends and folds around your car’s existing footwell shapes. They will either fit your vehicle as is or come with trimmable shapes for easy removal of access material to fit smaller footwells.  

This type is generally easier to install minus the trimming. But the flexible rubber does not hold liquids or dirt as well and it can be easier to spill when removing your mats for cleaning. Additionally, universal fitment floor mats won’t fit perfectly or cover the entirety of your footwells compared to custom fit mats. They can still let elements like mud, water, and rocks onto your carpet but generally are better than the factory option. 

Custom-fit mats on the other hand, like the Husky Liners Weatherbeater Floor Liners, offer superior coverage, fitment, and protection for your vehicle’s footwells. These mats are laser-measured and engineered to fit the unique shape of your footwells perfectly.

These often can have much taller sides and deeper wells for containing more debris, are engineered to funnel water toward the door, and even cover the door jam to prevent any elements from getting under the mat and onto your carpet.

The primary downside to custom floor liners is that they are typically considerably more expensive. Additionally, they are only available for certain makes and models of popular vehicles. You can only get these types if your vehicle is listed as compatible. Since these mats are vehicle-specific, they will not work in any other vehicle than the one they are manufactured to fit. 

Materials of Car Floor Mats

Car floor mats are made from heavy-duty plastic and rubber materials. Higher-end custom floor mats offer more environmentally friendly, heavy-duty plastics like the WeatherTech FloorLiner, which is made from a Thermoplastic Elastomer (TPE). It’s essentially odorless, contains no harmful PVCs, phthalate, BPA, cadmium, or lead, and is 100% recyclable.

These are usually a more rigid material that holds its shape or form so it can fit perfectly around all the curves and corners of your footwell. These types use lightweight and thinner materials compared to universal floor mats. 

Universal floor mats are made from a heavy-duty rubber compound. These don’t have as high of standards as custom floor mats and are mass-produced, meaning they aren’t environmentally friendly. These mats include the Motor Trend Flex Tough Floor Mats, which are heavier, thicker, and much more flexible. The flexible material is meant to bend over humps and bumps. 

Cleaning Car Floor Mats

While it’s more fun to go on adventures and pick up grime, there eventually comes a time to wash your vehicle and clean out your footwells. Each of the mats in this guide is meant to be easily removed from your car, dumped out, and cleaned with water or an additional cleaner.

Our top two floor mats, the WeatherTech FloorLiner and the Husky Liners Weatherbeater Floor Liners are cleaned very easily at the car wash without soap. Alternatively, the Rough Country Floor Mats, Motor Trend FlexTough Floor Mats, and Armor All Weather Defender Floor Mats car floor mats all seemed to stain more easily. They also required a more thorough cleaning with soap to return them to their original look.

We found the larger custom-fit liners to be harder to remove from the footwells, due to their larger more rigid shape — which meant we were less inclined to clean them. This especially applied to the second-row mat, as it was usually bulkier and harder to remove without making a mess since both passenger sides were connected as a broad single piece. 

Traction

There are two types of traction when talking about vehicle floor mats — the traction between the carpet and the floor mat, keeping the mats secure — and the traction on top of the floor mats for your shoes to grip while driving or getting in and out of the vehicle. We tested each floor mat’s grip in both aspects. 

Floor mats like the Armor All Weather Defender Floor Mats — which came with two Grip Claws per mat — and WeatherTech FloorLiner with TechGrip both held in place significantly better than their counterparts. The Husky Liners Weatherbeater Floor Liners stood out in this category with its large grip spikes on the underside of each mat. 

In terms of shoe grip and traction, the best performers were the WeatherTech FloorLiner followed by Rough Country Floor Mats, the Husky Liners Weatherbeater Floor Liners, then the Motor Trend FlexTough Floor Mats, and closing out with the Armor All Weather Defender Floor Mats. The top performers here had groves and channels in the floor mats. Those components not only held our shoe soles but also kept liquids from sloshing around while driving and helped funnel liquid to “reservoirs” where it could be easily dumped later on.  

Door Jam & Side Protection

While most dirt and mud settle on the bottom of your vehicle’s footwells, the sides and door jams are equally important for catching debris and keeping your carpet clean. Coverage of these areas was an important differentiation between universal fit and custom fit floor mats. 

Side

The sides of a car mat are technically the front, back, and sides of the mat that rise vertically from the bottom creating a deep well to catch and hold the elements. The WeatherTech FloorLiner mats had the deepest sides of the models we tested. This matters because it can hold a higher volume of liquid and dirt both inside the footwell and during removal, to avoid spilling into your carpet. 

Door Jam

Door jam refers to the flat section of the floor at the bottom of your vehicle’s door. Each door has its own door jam. This is a common spot your foot uses when getting in or out of your vehicle. Hence, it can get really dirty and collect a lot of grime.

Coverage of this area helps catch a considerable amount of elements into your floor mat tray. It also helps keep spills contained when removing the mats for cleaning, the door jamb coverage drops lower than the side acting as a funnel from the bottom of the mat up and over the door jam to the outside when its tilted. 

Price & Value

Budget

On the lower end, car floor mats like the malleable, universal-fitting Motor Trend Flex Tough Floor Mats ($38) are extremely affordable and protect your interior floors. These can be a great choice if you live in an urban or fairly dry place without mud, rain, and snow. They also work well for vehicles that don’t typically have pets, kiddos, or other frequent passengers.

Mid-Tier

Reaching the next level, we see an uptick in quality. The Rough Country Floor Mats ($140) are custom mats with more rigid materials. There’s also a lifetime warranty. You’ll notice the design is much more articulated with slanted edges that don’t allow melted snow or mud to seep over. The underside is typically more aggressive for better traction and the upper face has grooves to funnel liquid.

Premium

Punching in at more than $200, car floor mats like the custom, firm WeatherTech FloorLiner ($202) are even more long-lasting with high-end patented materials: a High-Density Tri-Extruded (HDTE) core for rigidity and friction on the underside. Premium liners also carry a lifetime warranty, reservoir barriers, and channels for diverting liquid.

The tradeoff is that these high-end mats fit much more precisely, and since they’re stiffer, they are harder to pull in and out of a vehicle. But they will endure more of a beating and offer ideal protection for your rig’s carpet.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. Aftermarket floor mats are designed to replace your factory floor mats and will not work in conjunction. Make sure to remove your original floor mats before installing any of the aftermarket floor mats from this guide. 

There are a few ways to clean your floor mats from at-home options to car washes. The easiest way is to detach any hooks or attachment points from your floor mats to your carpet, then, to avoid spilling, carefully lift it out of your vehicle and dump it on the ground. A few shakes will get rid of most debris before reinstalling.

Want to get rid of the stains and mud? You can use your garden hose and spigot to rinse off the floor mats at home or even use a recommended cleaning product for those hard-to-remove stains. Lastly, our favorite way of washing them is using a self-spray car wash.

Most self-spray washes have wall clamps that will hold your floor mats and you can spray them down with a pressure washer. Just remember to vacuum or clean any dirt from your carpet before reinstalling your freshly cleaned floor mats. 

The short answer is no, you don’t have to trim the mats, and often using a universal mat in a truck or large SUV requires no trimming. In other cases with custom-fit floor mats, some cutouts may have to be removed to fit over subwoofers and speakers.

Universal fit floor mats come with pre-marked trim lines so you can easily remove sections of the floor mat for a precise fit into smaller vehicles or to separate the mat to center more easily in the footwells. While scissors work, we found that a box cutter was the tool of choice for trimming rubber floor mats.

The second row refers to the row of seats directly behind the front or first row of seating. In contrast, the first row is where the driver’s seat and passenger seat are located directly in front of the windshield. Each floor mat tested in our guide came with second-row mats, which were tested along with the front-row mats. Some single-cab trucks or vans won’t need second-row mats. 

One of the top reasons to use aftermarket car floor mats is to preserve your vehicle’s carpet for years to come. Clean and pristine footwells can add to a vehicle’s resale value and protect it from the elements. Sometimes, aftermarket floor mats add a new look or color to your vehicle’s footwells, making it stand out more than factory vehicles.