How to wash it without wrecking it

In rough order of how much damage they do.

Automatic car washes with brushes

The single worst thing you can do to corrected paint. Those brushes have been dragged across hundreds of filthy cars before yours, and everything they picked up is still in the bristles. A handful of visits will put back swirls that took a day to remove.

Touchless automatic washes are less destructive because nothing physically contacts the paint, but they rely on aggressive chemistry to compensate, which is hard on protection over time.

One bucket

You wash a panel, the mitt picks up grit, you rinse the mitt in the bucket, the grit sinks and then comes straight back onto the mitt on the next dip. You are effectively sanding the car with its own dirt. This is the most common mistake by a wide margin.

Washing in direct sun

Water and shampoo dry on the panel before you can rinse them off, which leaves mineral spotting that can etch into the surface. In a Sydney summer a dark panel gets hot enough to do this within a minute. Wash early, late, or in shade.

The wrong towel

An old bath towel, a chamois that has been dropped on the driveway, or a microfibre that has been washed with fabric softener. Drying is contact, and contact with the wrong thing scratches.

It is the standard for a reason. One bucket holds your shampoo solution, the other holds clean rinse water, and both have a grit guard in the bottom.

Load the mitt from the wash bucket, do one panel, then rinse the mitt in the rinse bucket, scrubbing it against the grit guard so the dirt falls through and stays at the bottom. Only then go back to the wash bucket for more shampoo. The grit never gets a chance to return to the paint.

Wash in straight lines, front to back, rather than circles. If a piece of grit does get past you, a straight-line scratch is far less visible than a circular one and far easier to correct later. The circular motion is where the name swirl marks comes from.

The order matters

Start at the roof and work down. The lower quarter of the car, the sills and the bumpers carry the heaviest contamination, so they come last. Doing the sills first and then the bonnet drags road grime across your most visible panel.

Wheels get done first of all, with their own bucket, their own brushes and their own mitt that never touches paintwork. Brake dust is metallic and abrasive, and one wheel mitt used on a door is a day of correction undone.

Pre-rinse properly

Before anything touches the car, rinse it thoroughly, and use a snow foam if you have one. The point is to remove as much loose grit as possible while nothing is in contact with the paint. Every particle you take off in the pre-rinse is a particle that cannot be dragged across a panel later.

The whole kit costs less than a single correction, which is the argument for it.

• Two buckets with grit guards. Any buckets will do; the guards are the important part.
• A pH-neutral shampoo. Anything aggressive strips protection, and a shampoo marketed as a “wash and wax” often contains fillers that sit on top of a coating and dull it.
• A microfibre wash mitt, not a sponge. A sponge traps grit against a flat face and holds it there; a mitt lets it fall into the pile away from the paint.
• Separate wheel brushes and a dedicated wheel bucket.
• Two large plush drying towels.

Wash your microfibre separately from household laundry, with no fabric softener. Softener coats the fibres and turns a drying towel into something that smears and scratches.

Drying causes more damage than washing does, because by that point people are tired and rushing.

Do not drag a towel across the panel. Lay it flat, pat, and lift, or draw it gently in one direction without pressure. If you feel resistance, stop, because something is caught in the towel.

On a coated car most of the water sheets off on its own if you remove the nozzle and let a slow flood of water run over the panels. That alone takes most of it, and there is far less left to touch.

A filtered air blower is the best option if you have one, because it dries the shuts, mirrors and badge recesses that otherwise drip onto a dry panel ten minutes later.

Every coating manufacturer sells a maintenance spray, and most of the advice online tells you to use one every couple of months. It is broadly good advice, with a caveat.

What a topper actually does

It is a light silica spray applied after washing that sits on top of the coating and restores the water behaviour. It is not adding protection in any meaningful sense. It is refreshing the surface so water beads the way it did when the coating was new.

That matters because beading is how most people judge whether a coating is still working, and a topper makes it look healthy again. Which is genuinely useful, and also worth being slightly sceptical about, because it can mask a coating that is failing rather than fix it.

Use the one made for your coating

Manufacturers formulate toppers to work with their own chemistry. A generic spray sealant over a specific coating is usually fine and occasionally not, and since we know exactly what is on your car we can tell you which to buy rather than leaving you to guess in an aisle.

What not to put on it

Traditional carnauba wax. It sits on top of the coating, dulls the surface you paid for, and adds nothing, because the coating is already doing the job wax used to do.

Wash-and-wax shampoos, for the same reason. They contain gloss agents designed to deposit on bare paint, and on a coated car that deposit is just a film over your finish.

Anything described as a cleaner wax, a polish or a cutting compound. Those are abrasive. On a coated car you would be polishing off the coating.

If the beading has stopped

Do not reach for a topper first. Reduced beading is far more often a contaminated surface than a failed coating, and a topper over contamination just traps it. Wash it properly, decontaminate if it has been a while, and see whether the behaviour comes back. It usually does.

A coating resists chemical etching. It does not make it impossible, and time is the variable.

Bird droppings are acidic and, in summer heat, can etch into a clear coat within hours. Keep a detail spray and a microfibre in the boot and deal with it the day you see it.

Fuel spills down the side of a rear quarter will strip protection where they run. Rinse at the servo if you can.

Tree sap and industrial fallout bond rather than sit on the surface, and washing will not lift them. That is a decontamination job, which is part of a proper detail.

Brake dust on wheels bakes on with heat. Coated wheels release it far more easily — that is what wheel coating is for, but leaving it for months undoes that advantage.

Every fortnight if the car lives outside, every three to four weeks if it is garaged. More useful than the interval is the rule that a light wash done often beats a heavy scrub done rarely, because contamination that has not had time to bond comes off without effort.

Once or twice a year the car benefits from a decontamination wash: iron fallout remover and a clay stage to take out what has bonded despite the coating. That keeps the surface behaving the way it did on day one.

If any of this sounds like more time than you have, that is a completely reasonable position, and it is why we offer scheduled maintenance washes. It is the same wash we would do before any other work, done on a cycle, and it protects a correction that cost considerably more than the washes do.

Ask about maintenance washes →