With winter setting upon us, it’s important to get any road salt off your car as soon as possible if you don’t want it turning into dust. The best way to do that is to just wash it all off, but heaven helps you if you go to an automatic carwash or a cheap one run by a group of lads. 

It’s like painting your car with a wet sandblaster.

 

The problem is all of the other cars and the stuff, or “media,” that clung to other cars from driving around all day.

 

If the car before yours,  went on a dirt road, for instance, it would pull into the carwash just covered in mud and sand, and mud and sand are mostly made up of small bits of rock, including granite, which is extremely hard and abrasive.

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That grit tends to stick onto the cleaning apparatus of the carwash, which after a while can start to almost be like sandpaper.

 

Some of these car washes, seriously,  I’ve seen them where the brushes are gray to brown with dirt.

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With the high speed of the cleaning machines and the high pressure of the water, all that dirt and grit is rubbed along the surface of your car on its way off the body. And with it, can come a little bit of your paint.

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I don’t care what car wash it is, if it rubs that media on the surface of the paint finish, your paint can be stripped away.

 

Eventually, your car could end up with what’s called a “spiderweb scratch,” which basically looks how it sounds.

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Of course, if you’ve gone through the carwash a couple of times, all is not lost, I reassure you.

 

 You won't have to throw your brand-new- beloved Lexus straight into a dumpster.

 

Virtually all cars come with some level of scratch-resistant clear-coat straight from the factory, which should provide some level of protection.

 

It’s really only a concern if you take it to a carwash repeatedly, over the course of a number of years. And if your paint is only deformed, and not stripped entirely, it’ll probably go back to normal once a little heat is applied to it, even from the sun.

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And if you only plan on holding onto your car for a few years, it’s not something you’ll probably notice at all if you only go to the carwash every now and then. It’ll mostly start to look bad only after 1 year or more.

But I caution, not all cars are the same.

 

Most new cars come with an intermediate level of clear-coat protection, which should provide a good level of protection, he said. Some cars even have what he called “an advanced level of protection,” which “look as good coming out as they do coming in.”

So how do you know how good the protection is on your car? Well, that’s a much tougher question to answer.

 

Just because you get a high-end car doesn’t mean the manufacturer sprang for the higher-end paint protection at the factory. And even within a model, the level of protection can vary. For example, specifically pointed to the Ford F-150, which has different coatings depending on whether or not it was made at Ford’s City Assembly or its Truck Plant

 

Both meet the manufacturer's specifications, but they’re two different coatings.

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If you need to get stuff like salt off your car or any dirt, grime, or scratches, come to us at Prestige Detailing, it's worth the investment and most importantly you'll look like a rockstar ;)

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