The best post-holiday car clean
Time, the right technique and your road-trip-trashed car will look good as new, writes David Linklater.
There can be many casualties of holiday road trips: finances, family relationships, peace-ofmind.
But by far the most serious is the condition of your car. A twoweek holiday road trip is actually equivalent to two years of wearand-tear in car years, according to Stuff Motoring’s vehicle scientists.
The good news is that in a couple of hours you can give your vehicle the best clean it’s ever had and start 2018 with some shine.
You don’t need a lot of fancy gear or expensive cleaning products: just some basics and a bit of technique.
While it’s a Kiwi tradition to get the hose out and wash the car on the driveway, by doing so you’re flushing cleaning product and contaminants (brake dust, for example) into stormwater drains. Indeed, some councils have bylaws prohibiting you from doing so.
If you’re cleaning your car at home, best to do it on grass or gravel, which acts as a filter for the nasty stuff and keeps it out of waterways.
Early morning or late afternoon are best for exterior carcleaning, when the sun is low and temperatures cooler. Otherwise you’ll struggle to wipe the water clean before the sun gets it, leaving a streaky mess.
You can address all of the above by going to a jet wash, which treats and recycles water and will provide you with cover while you work. But that costs money, of course.
Sounds obvious, but start with the inside. You’ll want to get mats out and vacuum and you can’t do that after you’ve sprayed water everywhere.
Don’t be tempted to plaster slippery cleaning product all over your dashboard. It’s mostly just dust you’re dealing with, so a clean, damp cloth or chamois does the trick. Another reason to do the inside first: you can use the same cloth you’ve got for the final touches on the outside, while it’s still fresh and clean.
Take all the mats out and lay them on the ground. Then brush and vacuum the seats; if your car has suffered a sustained kid-attack and there are crumbs in the upholstery seams, it’s easy enough to suck them out with an appropriately narrow vacuum cleaner attachment. Use the same for the carpet on the floor - you’ll need it to get around the pedals and plastic moldings.
If you have crumbs in cupholders and other narrow spaces, you could also get the cleaner nozzle down there. But you might scratch the plastic, so be careful. That damp chamois might work just as well if you dab it on the debris. You might also find that some storage areas have a removable rubber lining.
If you have mystery stains on seat fabric, the cleaning method will depend on manufacturer instructions. But top tip: in general, baby wipes seem to have this miraculous ability to remove stains from car seats. Keep a pack in the glovebox.
Instrument panels and screens are keen collectors of dust and dirt. Give them a wipe with a clean wet cloth first to avoid scratching, but then finish off with either glass cleaner (you can buy special automotive stuff if you really want to) or mobile-phone screen-cleaner for touch-panels. Just take it easy on the liquid and never spray directly onto the surface: onto the cloth first and then wipe.
Advanced class: some cargroomers actually clean the cracks in between plastic dashboard mouldings with a tiny brush. Go on, you know you want to.
To the outside now. You’ll need some stuff: a couple of buckets, a sponge/soft brush/cleaning mitt, a smaller brush for wheels and a chamois or towel for the finishing touches.
You’ll also need some sort of cleaning product, but don’t fall into the trap of embracing another Kiwi tradition: cleaning your car with dishwashing detergent. It’s abrasive and can eat into the polish and/or paintwork of your car.
Stick with the automotivespecific stuff, which is not expensive and available from most supermarkets.
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.
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.