Car Wash

Yesterday my friend Dennis was giving me a lift home in his car. He noticed that there was some bird droppings on the car so he said he would stop at the car wash to just hose it off. So he proceeded to hose off the bird poop with the high pressured water which costs $1 for 90 seconds of water, quite expensive in my opinion since you can just do it for free at home. Those self car wash places have gotten really popular ever since they banned washing your car at home at the start of the year due to water shortage. Even though the ban is now lifted, people have gotten used to going to those self car wash place.

Anyway I digress again. So after Dennis had watered his car, he drove off to the vacuum/steam clean area and said that he needed to wipe the car. Personally I would have just drove off since the water would dry anyway but I understand what he means. If you don't wipe the water off, it leaves these water marks that make the car look dirty. So I thought he would just quickly wipe off the water. Instead he proceeded to slowly wipe the car clean bit by bit. So I looked around his car while waiting and noticed how clean it was. Not a speck of dust to be found. This is in total contrast to my car where the dashboard has such a thick layer of dust that the weight of the dust itself is holding it tight to the dashboard.

Dennis was not the only one drying his car. The guy next to us who we had witness wash his car in the next stall also proceeded to pull out a chamoise from his car boot and mirror the actions of Dennis and slowly dry the whole car. The sports car on the other side was also very clean. The guy in that car was vacuuming it out fully.

I think car owners fit into two groups, those who clean regularly and those who don't. Some people like Dennis and my other friend Paul love their cars and clean it every week or fortnightly. There cars are kept in nice and shiny condition and very clean. They have air freshners in their car and carry cleaning equipment in the boot of their car. Some people take it even more to the extreme. I know someone who wipes his car everyday as he gets home from work. The problem with that is he just uses a cloth and wipes it. What he is actually doing is basically applying sandpaper to his car. All the small dust particles that you can't see just gets rubbed into the paint of your car. His car now has all these swirling patterns on it. If you really want to keep your car clean, you have to do a proper wash where you hose it down with water to remove the loose dust particles and then proceed to clean it with soapy water to remove the dirt that is stuck tighter since it has combined with rain and become like a paste.

The second group of car owners are like myself. I like my car and think its a great car, but I just see it as a vehicle to get me around. I may clean it once every couple of months. Even when it was new I didn't really clean it. When I do clean it though, I make sure I do it thoroughly. First wash it, then wax it, clean windows with window cleaner, clean interior by vacuuming (since I tend to eat breakfast on the way to work, there are lots of crumbs in my car), wipe down dashboard and apply sun protectant to it. Since its such a long time between washes, every time it rains my car gets very dirty and hence it tends to generally look dirty. As you can see from the photo below, its currently quite dirty and this is currently pretty good in my opinion. It gets a lot worse sometimes.