Car detailing in Greenacre

Quotes labelled ‘full detail’ cover wildly different work, which is why prices vary by hundreds of dollars for something that sounds identical. Here is what ours involves, so you can compare like for like.

Exterior. The car is pre-rinsed and foamed so loose grit lifts off before a mitt goes near it. The contact wash uses clean media and two buckets. Then chemical decontamination pulls out iron fallout and tar, the bonded stuff a wash leaves behind that bleeds orange on white paint, and a clay stage takes whatever is still stuck to the clear coat.

Wheels and arches. Faces, barrels and arches, with separate equipment from the paintwork so brake dust never crosses over.

Interior. Vacuum everything, including under the seats and along the rails. Hot water extraction for carpets and cloth seats, steam for vents, switches and the tight spots a cloth cannot reach, and leather cleaned then conditioned with a product matched to its pH.

Finish. Glass inside and out, trim dressed, door shuts wiped, and then protection on the paint. A sealant by default, or a coating if the car is worth the step up.

A $150 ‘full detail’ skips decontamination and claying, because those stages are slow and invisible in photographs. Washing a contaminated car and then machine polishing it grinds that contamination across the panel, which is how cars come back from cheap details with more swirls than they went in with.

That damage is not cosmetic in the trivial sense. Correcting it later means removing clear coat, and clear coat is finite. The cheap detail costs you the expensive one.

Detailing before a sale is one of the few things that reliably returns more than it costs. Photos improve, inspections go better, and buyers negotiate less hard on a car that presents as cared for.

A pre-sale detail is a different job from a keeper’s detail. The goal is presentation now, not protection for five years, so the sensible spend is usually a single-stage polish, a proper interior and a good sealant.

These three do more damage to paint in a Sydney summer than anything else. Bird droppings are acidic and etch into the clear coat within a day in the heat. Sap bonds hard. Water spots from a sprinkler or a hot bonnet in the rain leave mineral deposits that turn into etching over time.

A detail removes the deposit, and light etching often polishes out. Deep etching that has gone into the clear coat is a paint correction job, and sometimes the honest answer is that the mark will fade but not vanish.

Protection is the real fix. A sealant or coating gives you the hours you need to get the dropping off before it bites, which on a car parked under a tree is the difference between a wash and a polish.

Most of the cars we detail get driven every day, parked on the street or in a work car park, and washed when someone remembers. That is the honest starting point and it should shape what you spend.

For that car, the priorities are the decontamination, a good interior and durable protection. A three-stage polish on a daily driver is money into a finish that the next six months of car parks will chip away at.

If the car is a keeper or a weekend car, the sums change and a deeper correction with a coating pays back. Say which it is when you call and the recommendation will be pitched at the right car.