Are Car Washes Scamming Us With Their Soap Practices?

You know, I thought that I was crazy having questioned if you’re actually getting what the car wash tells you that you’re getting for your money.

For anybody who has ever used an automated car wash, they know the drill. You drive up to the attendant or machine that asks you what kind of wash you want. From there, you can choose from a variety of different services that the car wash will or at least should provide.

On the low end, customers will be getting a basic wash but there are different types of chemicals that could be added on top of the basic wash. Instead of just regular old soap and water, sometimes wax is sprayed in the mix. Maybe somebody could opt to get a little bit of Rain-X as well to keep their car shining. In any case, these additions usually cost a little extra.

However, for most people, there’s really no way to actually know if you’re getting these chemicals that are promised or what kind of chemicals the car wash is using at all, for that matter. At the end of the day, it really comes down to trust and in a day and age where it seems like lots of people are trying to get over on lots of other people, trust can be a hard thing to have for someone like a car wash owner trying to maximize profits.

This time, we check in with a video from Donut Media that goes into the science of car wash and even goes undercover a little bit to do some research themselves. At the end of this video, we learn more than we ever thought we could possibly know about car washes and get a little bit of reassurance that we should be pretty comfortable heading into the local wash.

I guess that technically none of us will really be able to tell if the car wash on the corner is really doing what they say they are but this video might act as just a little bit of reassurance.