The best post-holiday car clean
Time, the right technique and your road-trip-trashed car will look good as new, writes David Linklater.
Top to bottom
This is actually the fun bit. As with the interior, clean from top to bottom.
Start by giving the whole car a gentle spray with clean water to soften up the dirt and grime. Then use the hose to fill two buckets: one with the soapy stuff and another with clean water.
Wash the car with lots of bubbles, but make sure you rinse your sponge/mitt/brush regularly in the clean-water bucket so you’re not just spreading dirt around.
Clean in straight lines rather than circles, to avoid leaving scratch marks as you wash the dirt away. Make sure you leave the lower parts of the car until the very last. The sills will be especially dirty, so it doesn’t hurt to use a special brush for those and the wheels.
And if you happen to drop your sponge - that’s a code red. Make sure you clean it thoroughly before reuse, as it may have picked up debris from the ground that’ll scratch paint. It doesn’t hurt to have two sponges on hand so you can stay on task and worry about the rinsing later.
Once you’ve scrubbed, rinse off again with clean water and have a really good look around for any spots you might have missed.
Then it’s time to clean the water off completely and make the car shine. An old-school chamois still works best but a clean towel also does the trick. Some people also use a rubber window scraper.
Start with a quick once-over to remove the big drops, then go back and finish up more carefully to get the panels gleaming.
Again, top to bottom: wipe the water away in straight lines, following the contours of each panel so that excess liquid washes away off the edge. There’s a bit of technique required here but the results can be fantastic.
Delight in the detail
Save some special attention for your wheels. It’s an old cardealers’ trick: if you only have two minutes to make a car look appealing, do the windows and wheels.
Even if you’ve opted to do the whole thing at an automated wash (shame on you, by the way), you’ll still need to do the rims and rubber.
The bad news is that wheels do require some time... and a small brush, as you’ll need to get into all the knooks and crannies. Brake dust is especially troublesome. You can buy spray-on wheel cleaner that helps loosen the black stuff - it helps, but it’s strictly optional. Once you’ve scrubbed, rinse the rims with the hose or by splashing a bucket of clean water on them.
The good news is that any car looks awesome with sparkling wheels. To take it to the next level, get the tyres nice and black as well. There’s at least one Kiwi carcleaning tradition that still works: a bit of black shoe polish around the sidewall can do the trick. But otherwise, there are plenty of tyreshine productss around that really are worth the money.