What washing method is used? Some volume-based places and many dealerships will use an automated tunnel wash…the ones with brushes or “soft cloths” that do the cleaning. These will typically be the least expensive types. You may get it at a cheaper price, but what is the real cost? You might as well be washing your car with rocks when you do this (and in many places you actually are!). A step up in the price category and you get a hand-wash, but then you have to ask what methods and tools they are using. In some cases the hand wash might as well be the tunnel wash because they’re running through many dirty cars, using just one bucket, and then same wash media all day long. And finally you have the one that takes the most time, costs the most, and is the most gentle on your vehicle…the two-bucket method with Grit Guards. So you can see that on one end of the spectrum you have a cheap and quick wash (but damaging), and on the other end you have a quite a bit more expensive job that takes upwards of an hour just for the wash portion of the detail, but is the most gentle (and thorough).
Is any machine polishing used? This will be the biggest difference in the level of detail, the amount of time, and the final price involved. And when we’re talking about machine polishing, it can take just an extra 30 minutes, or it can take 20+ hours depending on what you want to achieve. I can spend an entire page just breaking down the different possibilities, combinations, and precautions on the machine polishing stage of a full detail…there’s that much involved! On the low end (quick time) you’re simply going to get a deep cleaning while adding gloss and protection. On the high end (long time) you’re going to get all of the swirls and most of the scratches permanently removed, and the paint will look like it did when the car was brand new. Where you need to be careful however is when the claim is made to “use a high speed buffer to remove swirls…in just a few hours”.
How much interior detailing? Is it a quick vacuum and light wipedown of surfaces, are carpets being cleaned, is leather being treated, are all the cracks and crevices being tended to? The same term of “full detail” can represent a mere 15 minutes on the interior, or 2-3 hours worth of work.
16 янв 2022
