Ever since purchasing our GK5 in fall 2020, there's been a funky, sweaty sock smell in it.
We've owned other vehicles with cloth interiors and none smelled this bad. So clearly it's the car, not us.
My GF and I had it detailed at a reputable shop. Despite shampooing the seats etc, it seems the smell has returned.
We really don't want to resort to air "fresheners", as we find they just try to mask the smell without actually addressing it.

As a last resort, I noticed there's a zipper on the seat backs. Does this mean we can remove the material and clean them?
If so, has anyone successfully accomplished this?
As a last resort, we were considering replacement seats, but once you add heaters and adjusters and brackets (similar to stock) it's easily 2k per seat.

Thanks in advance

 

You can't just pull the seat covers off to clean them. The are held in by special clips that take professionals with special tools to get back in place correctly. But detail shops do have hand held cleaners that can get anything out without removing the covers. I recommend taking that job to a profession detailers.

 

Might also not be the seats... could be other things such as the carpet or the A/C evaporator core. After various seat cleaners kinda working for a short term, we recently got a Hoover extractor vacuum ... and wow! It was insane how much crud it sucked out of our seats and carpet. In our case, cleaning the carpet with the extractor vac was amazing... made way more difference than cleaning the seats. A pro shop will only go over your seats with one or maybe two passes. Over the course of a couple weeks, we did like a half dozen passes on the seats and carpet. Made a huge difference. Also, I found that cleaning the A/C evaporator core helped a bunch in removing some faint dank-scent. There's videos out there on how to do it, but the basic idea is the core collects dust and gunk over time and spraying an a/c core cleaner (like from Home Depot or somewhere) into the evaporator core area cleans off much of that gunk and helps. There's a couple screws holding in some electrical sensor into the airway that goes from your blower fan under the passenger dash to the center of the dash. The videos show you spray the foaming A/C cleaner into that passage and let it sit until it de-foams, then repeat a couple times. These things helped us.

 

Awesome, thanks for the ideas!