Car washing is making a comeback

'Moisture is a car’s worst enemy, Gerald. So why are you washing it?'

So says Julie Walters in the 1985 comedy Car Trouble in which she plays frustrated housewife Jacqueline, whose pernickety husband has transferred his affection to an obsessively pampered Jaguar E-Type.

The Sunday morning scene in which Gerald lovingly polishes the car’s famously phallic bonnet (Jacqueline refers to his ‘penis substitute’ more than once) is one that once took place in streets and suburban driveways the length and breadth of Britain.

But now the sight of someone cleaning their own car with foaming water, sponge and chamois leather is a rare one. Such manual labour is deemed too trivial, grubby and time-wasting for today’s modern professional, especially since every conurbation now offers its own version of the team from the best film dedicated to the subject – Car Wash, 1976 – who will usually give your wheels a once-over for a fiver.

It was the rise of such set-ups combined with the popularity of the forecourt jet wash that caused the demise of the at-home Sunday ritual. Although there were signs that it might be revived during the mid-1990s when the Telegraph magazine produced a double page spread showing A-listers ‘keeping it real’ by washing their own cars in the street.

Among them was Madonna who was photographed stretching coquettishly to soap her roof, an image that prompted a once highly successful celebrity acquaintance of mine to attempt a rekindling of fame by sponging-off her ageing Mercedes in the hope that the car wash paparazzi might be lurking. They weren’t.

But hold that hosepipe – because self car-washing has actually made a mighty comeback in some circles. Except it’s not called ‘washing’ any more, but ‘detailing’ and, according to a newly-published book called Hand Wash Only, you’ll be needing a whole lot more than a bucket of water and a few old rags if you’re planning to get into it properly.

Running to 143 pages the book (subtitled ‘a beginner’s guide to detailing and car care’) speaks at length of the ‘wash kit list’, the ‘decontamination kit list’, the ‘correction kit list’, the ‘protection kit list, ’ the ‘engine bay kit list’ and the ‘interior kit list’.

If the image illustrating all of the above is accurate, a whole other garage is required just to accommodate the ‘kit,’ and more than a superficial understanding of chemistry might be useful, too, so you can get to grips with the removal of ‘hydrocarbons’, ‘bonded contaminants’ and ‘fallout’.

And as for polishing – before even thinking about that, you’ll need to know your paint type and thickness and then brush-up on your glossary. After all, no one wants to confuse their pig tails with their fisheyes or their orange peel with their road rash, do they?

It’s no longer a manual job either. These days, you’ll need a polishing machine and a selection of pads (wool, foam, microfiber), a suitable arsenal of polishing compounds – and then something to protect and seal the paint.

All that, of course, is just for starters. The book offers further chapters on interior restoration, odour removal and glass, wheel and engine cleaning. Even the correct methods of headlamp buffing and tyre polishing are addressed in detail.

Once seen as a job that you paid your children 50 pence to do, car cleaning has, it seems, turned into a multi-million dollar business that has spawned specialist operators around the world – some of which even take brand new supercars off the showroom floor and ‘detail’ them before their owners will even consider slipping behind the wheel.

The art of sympathetically returning an apparently mouldering wreck to a vehicle that sparkles has also been proven to make irresistible YouTube viewing.

Since it was posted in 2019, one 18-minute video showing a Mercedes-Benz sports car being professionally washed for the first time in 37 years has attracted more than 21 million views, while 14 million have watched similar footage showing a ‘barn find’ Datsun brought back to life having lainbeneath a layer of filth since the 1970s.

They really are well worth watching.

Especially if you’re looking for another excuse to avoid washing the bloody car.

Hand Wash Only, a beginner’s guide to detailing and car care is produced by Pro Detailer magazine (Amazon, £12.95)