Hi,

I have a spanking new 2008 Outlander LS. I tried to put a bike in
the back and scuffed up my headliner very badly. A headliner
is the soft fabric roof inside of the car.

Any ideas how to remove or lessen the scuff marks.

 

How ironic. I bought my wife a bike for Christmas and did the same thing when putting in the back to take it home from the store. Unfortunately I haven't figured out a way to totally get rid of them. You may want to try taking a damp (not wet) cloth and gently pressing to push the fabric back down, but once the fabric gets scratched its hard to get rid of the marks.

 

Did this work for you? No point both of us stuffing up our headliners using
the same technique!

 

The damp cloth didn't really help in my case, but maybe you didn't scuff or scratch it as bad as I did. The fabric on the headliner is very thin and in my case the scratch marks were deep enough to go down to the base of the material so there really isn't much I can do to fix them.

 

Probably a better way to explain it is think of the headliner like the exterior of your car. You have a thin layer of paint and clearcoat (the fabric) and then the bare metal (the cardboard or whatever they use for the base of the headliner).

If your car is white and someone with a red car parks next to you and gently opens their door and hits your car you will end up with a red smudge on your white car that you may be able to remove with rubbing compound. On the other hand if they open the door hard and you end up with a scratch down to the bare metal you have a bigger problem. In my case with the headliner the damage has went down to the "bare metal". As far as I know there is no product out there to fix the scratch on the headliner.

 

I don't really have a scratch per se, its more like
a welt (i.e. a small protruding ridge) where I dragged
the bike handles against the headliner.