Car Care and Detailing: It Matters To You
Most things in life require proper care and maintenance: our homes, lawns, family, marriage. The same goes for our vehicles. Without proper care, our plumbing can get clogged, lawns overgrown with weeds, family distant and marriages fall apart.
Likewise for a car it is only a matter of time before the fast food crumbs reach critical mass in the unreachable crevices around the seats. An accumulation of gooey coffee drippings caked down the sides of the middle console along with questionable stains in carpets and upholstery, rendering your interior straight up nasty. Let’s not even start with dog hair.
Meanwhile, on the exterior, the paint begins to fade as it daily receives a UV beat down from the blazing sun (not at all helped by the abrasive wash cycles in most drive-thru car washes). Your night time drives become increasingly hazardous with the steady yellowing of the headlights, eerily reminiscent of your teeth. Joking! 😁 But seriously, some of you would soon need dentures if you took care of your teeth similarly to your car.
You get it. Cars get dirty. I wholeheartedly believe that a clean and protected car matters to you. It matters financially, mentally, physically and yes even for safety - oxidized headlights anyone?! We all spend a considerable amount of time in our vehicles.
There are several points I want to share with you about car care, and in particular, what a detailer can offer to help you out with this.
Competency - Years ago, I genuinely believed that I could take my car to a car wash, foam it and rinse off, and that would get it looking like a show car. I always left frustrated as the pressure washer left lines in the dirt that were still clinging to the paint. I couldn’t understand why my cars would gradually look faded and older, tires still brown when I was pressure washing it. A quality detailer has workflows, processes, tools/equipment, product and competency to get your vehicle thoroughly clean. While you can regularly clean your vehicle yourself, this is a difficult task and it is difficult to get the results and thoroughness that a detailer brings to the table. Someone who does it as a profession daily has figured out how to get it done right and effectively. It is hard work and takes significant time to clean the interior and exterior of a car to a professional standard.
Protection: A quality detailer will gear their services towards protecting your vehicle. Is cleaning the car all there is to it? Of course not. But you can’t properly protect without first properly cleaning and decontaminating the paint. When you look at classic cars that are in mint condition, wondering how they have remained in this condition, it is likely that it was meticulously cleaned, prepped, and protected with proper products. Wax, Sealants, Ceramic Coatings, and Graphene Coatings among other products offer many protective benefits to the paint. Black trim is often quick to fade - protecting it will keep it safe from decay. Again, a quality detailer will gear his services towards protecting your vehicle.
Correction - This category is why auto detailers can get expensive. Take for example oxidized headlights. Professional level restorations involve several sanding stages, compounding and polishing, followed with a clear coat or ceramic coating. Paint with deep defects can take days to sand, compound and polish. These results are usually phenomenal, but take significant amounts of time and skill. It is beneficial to focus on the cleaning and protecting steps early on for new vehicles, so that any correction is avoided or very minimal needed in the future.
Education - When you find a quality detailer, you have not only found someone to keep your car in mint condition, but you have also found a wealth of car knowledge for daily upkeep, maintenance, and best practices to keep your car feeling brand new.
This is a very brief list of the many things that make detailers valuable to you and caring for your car. Lookout for future car care blogs for more specific tips and information on keeping your vehicle clean and protected, so it doesn’t need to be corrected.