Commenters are fuming after we cleaned our A2 with a garage brush, but I’ve had enough of the detailing police
Alongside the recent feature that Matt Prior wrote about getting 100mpg out of his Audi A2, there was a video that went on Autocar’s YouTube channel.
It opens with a shot of Matt at a jet wash, cleaning the A2. Scroll down and, reliable as clockwork, there they are: the commenters lambasting him for ruining the Audi’s paintwork by using ‘the brush’. Of course, they’re ignoring the fact that this is a £500 car whose paintwork is already far from pristine.
There’s an expectation that if you love cars, you also love the act of meticulously cleaning them. I must confess that I don’t subscribe to this, partly because car cleaning takes on a different nature if you work for a car magazine and partly because I just don’t care enough about how shiny a car is.
If you’re passionate about ‘detailing’, you would probably be horrified by what goes on during Autocar photoshoots. Most agree that cars generally photograph better when clean, so that’s what we usually aim for, save for exceptions like off-road tests, where the mud is a feature.
But what do you do when you’re shooting a group test on top of a Welsh mountain and the nearest proper car-washing facility is at least 10 slushy, muddy miles away?
We don’t have the budget for mobile valets to follow us around, so we deploy field solutions. We should probably use some fancy detailing spray, but in reality the road testers’ weapons of choice tend to be microfibre cloth and glass cleaner spray.
Mr Muscle is a firm favourite because, unlike many cleaning sprays, it is actually quite powerful, it doesn’t tend to leave streaks or haziness and, most importantly, it’s widely available.
I usually make sure to carry some microfibre cloths in my laptop bag, because cars have been known to get attacked with mineral water and kitchen roll by unsympathetic photographers.
I like to have some respect for the cars loaned to us by the various press offices. But cleaning cars in this way does rather take the romance out of testing, particularly when there’s also a gale blowing and the ambient temperature is 5deg C.
When it comes to my own cars, I’m mercifully blessed with one that had pre-ruined paintwork when I bought it – an underrated feature of used machinery.
As a result, I don’t feel guilty about taking my R50 Mini to my local automatic car wash, or indeed using the jet-wash brush of shame on it myself.
My E30 BMW, though, is a different story. The previous owner had it resprayed and, while it’s not a concours-level job, the car is quite shiny and largely free of scratches. So I’m giving the art of DIY car washing another go.
One of the benefits of modern life is that for any given skill you may wish to acquire, there exists a YouTube tutorial. The trouble with washing cars, however as evidenced by the commentariat under our A2 video is that people take it just too seriously. As such, there exists not one tutorial but innumerable ones, each one more fanatical than the other.
Most of them would have you believe that it is absolutely imperative to have four different buckets with grit guards at the ready, or you will irreparably scratch your paint. You must also invest in a foam gun, various exotic elixirs and a mitt made from the wool of only the softest lambs.
And if you’re not spending five hours per wheel cleaning every spoke individually with a specially designed toothbrush, well, that’s just plain neglect.
The result is that I put it off. So far, I’ve managed to get one free wash off the seller when I went to pick it up and one from a garage when it went in for some work last year.
I’ve had a couple of goes myself, but each time I ended up anxious that I’d done it wrong, as well as frustrated that the car didn’t actually seem that much cleaner than when I’d started.
