Best car mats on sale
Carpets are expensive to replace, which is why a set of high-quality floor mats is a valuable investment for your car
One of the areas of your car that takes the most abuse is its floor, with driver and passengers climbing in and out, mucky shoes, shuffling feet and shopping bags all contributing to wear and tear.
If you don’t protect your car’s carpets, then before you know it, you may find them stained, scuffed or holed. And on the basis that new carpets are an interior-out job, the cost of replacement can be huge.
That’s why a set of floor mats is a sensible investment, but with a wide choice of aftermarket options available, which is best? Here, we’ve brought together a mixture of mats – universal and tailored, rubber and fabric – to see which are tougher than the rest and will provide the best protection.
How we tested
In each case, we ordered a set of four mats and looked at the overall quality and finish. With fabric ones, we looked at the depth of the pile and thickness of the stitching, while with rubber mats we were more concerned with the thickness and weight of the rubber. We also looked at how easy the mats were to install, and how much each set would cost. We also then conducted a safety test with each set of mats, which included a 15-minute test drive to check for movement, and shuffled our feet to see if the mat moved.
Best car mats
Below we rank the best cars mats currently on sale...
Simply Brands Excalibur Car Mats
- Price: around £25
- Fitting: Universal
- Rating: 5 stars
- Contact: carsparesltd.com
Used - available now
2020 BMW
X2
27,965 milesAutomaticPetrol2.0L
Cash £17,300
2024 Volkswagen
T-Roc
25,582 milesManualPetrol1.0L
Cash £16,500
2024 Volkswagen
Tiguan AllSpace
15,772 milesAutomaticPetrol1.5L
Cash £22,800
2024 BMW
i4
22,009 milesAutomaticElectric
Cash £32,500Quality was very much a key consideration in these tests and the Excalibur mats thoroughly impressed us. They feel very sturdy and have a wipe-clean rubber surface, but also have a carpeted heel pad for extra durability and more control if you have wet shoes. They didn’t move around in our driving and foot-shuffling tests, while grooves in the upper surfaces of the mats work as guides, should you need to trim them to fit your car.
Halfords Rubber Car Mats
- Price: around £20
- Fitting: Universal
- Rating: 4.5 stars
- Contact: halfords.com
At £20, this set of heavy-duty rubber mats is great value. They are weighty and have a textured underside to stop them slipping around in the footwell, while guides on the upper surface make them easy to trim to fit your car. They feel extremely durable and are also nice and easy to keep clean, although the bare rubber top surface isn’t as luxurious as some of the plusher carpet mat sets here.
DB Bespoke Tailored Mats
- Price: around £20
- Fitting: Tailored
- Rating: 4.5 stars
- Contact: amazon.co.uk
DB Bespoke offers mats for cars going right back to the early nineties. We bought a set that had to be made to order, to test their customer service, and we received them within 72 hours. The mats come with a fitting kit so you can pin them in place in the driver’s footwell, preventing any undue movement. The carpet fabric feels a little lightweight, but the mats look great and fit perfectly.
Carsio Tailored Rubber Car Mats
- Price: around £15
- Fitting: Tailored
- Rating: 4 stars
- Contact: carsiocarmats.co.uk
Carsio says it can produce tailored rubber mats for most makes and models of car, so we put them to the test by ordering a set for a 30-year-old Alfa Romeo. They came up trumps, but it did take almost two weeks for the mats to arrive. Made from a flexible rubber, the mats drop into the footwell. There are also retaining pins if you wish to use them. They passed our safety tests with flying colours, with no movement.
Halfords Universal Car Mats
- Price: around £16
- Fitting: Universal
- Rating: 3.5 stars
- Contact: halfords.com
This set of universal carpet mats from Halfords is available with a range of stitching options – as well as black, you can have red, white, blue, green or even pink. The mats feel fairly well made and are a simple, drop-in universal design, but we did find they moved around quite a bit in our foot-shuffling test, so would need to be adjusted regularly. But the quality felt the best of the carpeted mats on test.
Carmats.co.uk Universal Car Mats
- Price: around £20
- Fitting: Universal
- Rating: 3 stars
- Contact: carmats.co.uk
This universal set of mats from carmats.co.uk looks smart and arrives in compact packaging. You need to unfurl them and let them flatten out before installing, though. We found this universal set wasn’t ideal, because the fabric mats are light and prone to moving around the footwell quite a bit once in-situ. The company also does tailored mats, and we expect these would be a better option.
Temu Universal Rubber Car Mats
- Price: around £13
- Fitting: Universal
- Rating: 3 stars
- Contact: temu.com
There is a wide range of car mats on Temu, with some rather outlandish designs. We opted for one of the most sensible sets – a four-piece rubber kit that can be trimmed to fit. If you just want a set of budget mats, they’ll do the job, but we found the rubber finish was quite hard and that the rubber had a very strong smell, which will hopefully dissipate with time. The mats feel sturdy though and don’t move around in use.
RAC Heavy Duty Car Mats
- Price: around £12
- Fitting: Universal
- Rating: 2 stars
- Contact: bmstores.co.uk
Retail-park chain B&M has a range of RAC-branded car accessories and tools, and some of them have impressed us in the past. But not this set of car mats. Not only does the quality feel cheap, with the heel pad in particular feeling thin, but when tested in use, they also moved around in the footwell to the extent that when we got to the end of our drive, they’d turned through almost 90 degrees.
Verdict
- Simply Brands Excalibur Mats
- Halfords Rubber Car Mats
- DB Bespoke Tailored Mats
If you want a high-quality, no-nonsense set of car mats, then the Simply Brands Excalibur ones are hard to beat – they feel well made and are heavy, which means they stay in place.
The Halfords rubber mats are also good, but lack the carpeted heel pad and weightiness of the Simply set.
The DB mats were our favourite tailored option. They’re smart, look good, and fitted the footwell of our test vehicle perfectly.
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