What Are the Benefits of Car Detailing?
Auto detailing has some obvious benefits, like visually improving the appearance of your vehicle. There’s also the quality of drive, being able to enjoy driving your vehicle more because it’s clean and visually appealing, so it looks its best. Your vehicle is a visual representation of yourself, so a clean, well-maintained, professional-looking vehicle says the same about you.
While those things are all true, there are actually some logical, scientific benefits as well to why you might want to consistently maintain your car with auto detailing.
Protecting Your Vehicle’s Exterior
If you’ve ever seen the buildup that forms in the jambs of your trunk or hood of your vehicle in Washington State, then you’ve seen how much pollen, dirt, and debris is in our environment. When we see vehicles come into the shop here that have just been run through the Brown Bear car wash for a couple years and haven’t seen any true detailing, we frequently see the beginning of, or even sometimes advanced stages of, paint failure in all of the jambs of the vehicle, and sometimes even on the flat surfaces like the roof, the trunk, and the hood.
The reason for that is when organic material like pollen, dirt, and things of that nature sit on your painted surfaces, they decompose and actually degrade and damage the painted surfaces of your vehicle. That’s an extreme example of what’s happening to your vehicle’s entire painted surfaces at all times. Add UV damage and road salt and the situation is greatly amplified.
So where detailing comes in to save the day here is thoroughly cleaning all the painted surfaces of your vehicle, including all the cracks, crevices, valleys, jambs, fuel doors, you name it.
This includes:
- Clay barring all of the stuck-on, hard-to-remove contaminants.
- Polishing the outer surface of the paint to remove any damaged or oxidized paint.
- Sanitizing the surface again w/ isopropyl alcohol
- Applying a ceramic-based protection.
All these things combined clean the vehicle surface and then provide a barrier to all of the elements, so that when these organic materials are decomposing on your vehicle, they are not decomposing on your vehicle’s finishes. Instead, they are sitting on this outer sacrificial barrier of the ceramic coating.
Ceramic coatings are really good at resisting failure due to these environmental contaminants, and they’re extremely good at protecting your vehicle’s finishes against the harms of UV and environmental contaminants.
Therefore, at least once or twice a year, having your vehicle clay barred and protected with a ceramic-based product should keep your vehicle’s finishes looking fantastic for years to come, not to mention the enjoyment level of driving around a much nicer-appearing vehicle while you’re maintaining your vehicle as well.
Well-maintained vehicles have a much higher resale value and typically warrant even hundreds or thousands of dollars more when you go to sell them, and they sell much quicker.
The Health and Longevity of Your Interior
When it comes to interiors of vehicles, all of your interior fabrics are a giant trap for bacteria, allergens, dirt, and debris. Driving around in that environment is unsanitary and not healthy.
Regular professional detailing of the interior of your vehicle cleans these fibers and provides a safer, more sanitary, fresher-smelling, better driving experience for you and your family. In addition to that, it helps preserve the fibers and visual appearance of your vehicle for years to come.
In Summary
There are many benefits to having your vehicle professionally detailed both inside and out. Having your car detailed twice per year with a little touching up in-between is what we recommend as the ideal maintenance schedule to keep your car in excellent shape for as long as possible. This may or may not be reasonable or affordable to everyone.
When it comes down to it, you have to decide what level of maintenance fits your needs and your budget. We hope we have shared enough information here to help you make a more informed decision going forward.
Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions or to book an appointment.
