You spent an arm and a leg for a supercar. So what are you doing paying a neighborhood kid ten bucks to wash it with a bucket and sponge? Gurcharn Sahota’s car wash business, Elite Detailing, knows how treat a luxury car right, and he’s charging premium money to do it.
Working out of his parents’ garage in Derbyshire, UK, the enterprising young man has quite the skewed definition of a “car wash.” Instead of merely scrubbing the vehicle to a shine, he lavishes an entire month’s worth of attention to it, cleaning every nook and cranny to leave it looking like you just picked it out of the showroom floor.
Elite Detailing starts out by bathing the car in water with pH-neutral shampoo, applied by a jet wash at temperatures of around 120-degrees C, which he scrubs with lamb’s wool mitten. Wheels are then steam-cleaned at 150-degrees C, using a machine purchased from the NHS. Once those are done, the car is dried using microfiber towel and an industrial blower. After that, he rubs a clay bar across the bodywork, picking up any remaining contaminants, like atmospheric pollutants and tree saps, before another round of rinsing and drying. Next, he examines barely-visible marks in the paintwork using a police-issue forensic microscope, then proceeds to perform a two-stage polishing process to get them removed. And that’s just the “standard valet” (starts at £700) service.
The premium version, which costs £7,200 up, includes sanding the car down twice to even up the paint thickness, three coats of highly-concentrated carnauba wax to seal the paint (standard valet gets just one) and a special sealant treatment for the vehicle’s plastic parts. According to Sahota, the premium valet is only needed once in a car’s lifetime, so most of his regulars go for the cheaper, but still work-intensive, standard version.
Because of the price, Elite Detailing’s clientele consists primarily of supercar owners, who bring their Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Porsches into his shop for regular cleaning. When they say luxury cars will kill you with the maintenance costs, I guess they weren’t kidding.
[via Daily Mail]