Can Your Car’s Onboard Sterilizer Actually Clean a Smartphone?
The Genesis G90’s onboard UV-C sterilizer claims to eliminate 99.9 percent of surface bacteria—so we tested it.
Think of the grossest thing that you have with you at all times. You do everything with it. You take it wherever you go (bathrooms included), and sometimes you even rely on it to figure out how to get there. It's your smartphone, and it's probably disgusting—you touch it a zillion times per day, after all, after touching door handles, subway handrails, raw poultry, etc. If you can't be bothered to wipe it down with an alcohol pad every once in a while, there exists an alternative: Buying a Genesis G90 luxury sedan.
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We know shelling out nearly six figures for a phone cleaner seems preposterous. But this phone cleaner also goes with you wherever you go—because it has an engine and moves under its own power. It also has massaging seats, self-closing doors, and nifty power-retractable sunshades. The G90, one of which we have for a yearlong test, might just be the most versatile smartphone cleaner around.
We're not kidding. The G90 comes with what Genesis refers to as a "UV-C LED sterilizer" in the rear-seat armrest. Simply drop the phone (or phone-sized object) you'd like cleaned into the compartment under the armrest, activate the compartment's six ultraviolet-emitting LEDs via a button labeled "UV-C," close the lid, and watch a little icon appear in the upper corner of the rear-seat armrest indicating the cubby is "on," and 10 minutes later when that icon disappears, bingo, your stuff is cleaned. (A chime or other indication that the process is complete would be more satisfying and easier to discern, but we suppose the idea is that you leave your device in the sanitizer for some time, either because it's charging or you're napping in one of the G90's first-class-like rear seats.) Genesis claims that a ten-minute UV light bath is enough to eliminate 99.9 percent of surface germs and bacteria. But is it?
What Did We Swab, and How?
To put that claim to the test, we purchased a children's science kit on Amazon replete with petri dishes, sterile swabs, and mercifully brief instructions for how to culture samples from swabbed objects. Geared for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math)-curious youths aged five and up—so, on a similar maturity level as this writer—the kit promised to reveal relative bacteria concentrations on swabs taken from everyday items. Dip the sterile swab (a long Q-tip thingy) in some distilled water, swab something, then rub it into the agar plate on the petri dish and wait. Any bacteria caught by the swab would be cultured, showing up as variously sized blooms in the dishes. The more schmutz in the dish, the grosser the swabbed object, and vice versa. Lacking an incubator, we needed to wait longer for our results (two to three days, versus overnight), but after 72 hours, we had concrete results.
Obviously, we tested our iPhone first, swabbing the phone and culturing it before sticking the phone into the Genesis G90's UV-C sterilizer for the prescribed ten-minute cleaning. After removing the "cleaned" iPhone, we repeated our swabbing process using another petri dish. In a bid to keep things as scientific as possible, we used nitrile gloves, changing them out between each swabbing, and took care not to breathe on or get too close to the dishes during the swab-sample-to-dish transfer process.
With before and after iPhone swabs, we also grabbed two control swabs from two guaranteed-to-be-gross locations: The G90's steering wheel rim, and the mouth of this author's dog, Wally. We wanted to see if the UV-C sterilizer worked on the iPhone, would the "sterilized" iPhone still be considered clean compared to incontrovertibly icky surfaces? Plus, we were already down the hypochondriac rabbit hole and were curious how nasty the G90's steering wheel was. Ditto Wally's snoot, which regularly rummages through table scraps from a toddler, underbrush, and his own business end.
Our bacteria cultures meticulously gathered—well, aside from Wally's, since he mostly tried to eat the swab, turning the process into more of a slobbery fight over a tiny stick—we secured the dishes' lids, flipped them upside down, and placed them on a tray in an area of my house that's temperature-neutral and out of sunlight (a closet shelf). After three full days, here are our results:
In a resounding first place—meaning grossest surface we tested—is the dog's mouth. Seeing as how Wally's mouth spends a lot of time under his own tail, this makes sense. It's also a reminder that anyone who says a dog's mouth is actually clean either has never observed a dog before or is lying to make you feel better about these furry things sleeping in bed alongside their humans.
Next up is the G90's steering wheel, with a much smaller, but still notable, bacterial bloom in our test dish. We'll be hitting that rim with some alcohol wipes shortly. And, lo and behold, in third place we have this author's iPhone, pre-UV sanitization. Mercifully, given this public forum, the phone was relatively clean to begin with, producing only the faintest bacterial trace on the petri dish.
That leaves the UV-C-sterilized iPhone surface as the cleanest we tested, and demonstrably cleaner than it was before its ultraviolet light bath. In fact, we could detect no visible bacteria cultures at all on our test dish. Does that mean the G90 erased all bacteria from the phone? Not necessarily—this test is lowercase-"s" scientific, meaning it's just exacting enough to show us relative bacteria concentrations on different surfaces. In other words, we can't definitively say whether Genesis' claim that the sterilizer removes 99.9 percent of surface germs is accurate, but our test clearly shows that the UV-C LED box between the G90's rear seats does something . We'll be dropping our phones in there more often, now—it's more convenient than rummaging around for sanitizing wipes.
Other Takeaways and Reservations?
One drawback to the UV-C compartment that we noticed right away is its size, or lack thereof. This author's iPhone 13 Pro barely fit and needed to be propped up on its side, sort of diagonally in the box. An older, smaller iPhone could lie flat, however. It's a weird oversight, given the generously sized wireless chargers elsewhere in the G90, including the rear-seat charger immediately ahead of the UV-C box in the rear-seat armrest console.
Also, having run out of test dishes, we couldn't determine whether the dark side of whichever object you're sanitizing—say, the bottom surface of a phone lying flat in the compartment—would be as cleaned as the top surface, which is hit more directly with UV-C light. But figure on two ten-minute sessions, one for the top, and another for the bottom, after flipping your phone like a pancake in between them, for fuller sanitization. Commendably, Genesis includes two USB ports in the UV-C compartment itself, so you can charge a device while it's being cleaned.
You could, in theory, sanitize any number of random objects using the G90's compartment, provided they fit in there. Got an, ahem, intimate personal item in need of some cleaning? Sure. A grubby smartwatch? Go ahead! Genesis simply warns users to not keep objects inside the chamber too long, with the owner's manual noting "prolonged exposure under ultraviolet rays may change the color and shape of the object."
There is a semantic difference between the terms "sterilize" and "sanitize," by the way. The former describes a process that aims to eliminate all germs, while the latter merely lowers their number. Given how the G90's UV-C setup falls short of 100 percent germ genocide, we think it's more of a sanitizer, not a sterilizer. As such, it almost goes without saying, the G90's sanitizer should not be relied on as an actual, you know, medical-grade sanitizer. If you plan on performing emergency surgery, don't toss your implement in the UV-C compartment and expect it to be sterile and ready for risk-free slicin' and dicin'. The compartment also notably does not physically clean surfaces—meaning if you sneeze on your iPhone and stuff it in the sterilizer, schmutz and all, it likely won't emerge from its ultraviolet bath much "cleaner," since it'll still be covered in snot. So, maybe keep some Lysol wipes handy after all, even if the Genesis G90 makes for the handiest de-germer of small objects we've used yet.
More on Our Long-Term 2023 Genesis G90:
- Damn You People, Go Back to Your Shanties!
- Highway Driving Assist II: Not Driving Is a Luxury
- Candles That Smell Like the Car? Really?
- Tiny Fender Bender, Big Buck Repair
- Our G90 Perfumes Its Cabin (Yep!)
- The Key to Enjoying Our G90? No Key at All
- How Are Those Power-Closing Doors Holding Up?
Front seat belt pretensioners could explode.
(Recall no. 23V210000)
A lifelong car enthusiast, I stumbled into this line of work essentially by accident after discovering a job posting for an intern position at Car and Driver while at college. My start may have been a compelling alternative to working in a University of Michigan dining hall, but a decade and a half later, here I am reviewing cars; judging our Car, Truck, and Performance Vehicle of the Year contests; and shaping MotorTrend’s daily coverage of the automotive industry.
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