Frequent car washes are necessary to ensure the car remains fresh and tidy and the paintwork remains shiny. But handwashing the car can get hectic on a daily basis so most of us reside to a nearby automatic car wash.

There’s no doubt that they considerably clean most of the dirt off the surface of your car in no time. But their washing procedures are aggressive and highly commercial. Their equipment and brushes are mostly clogged with dirt and debris from consecutive car washes. Although they regularly clean their equipment and replace the brushes most of them, in order to increase their profit margins, delay these cycles. Or use substandard brushes to make the most out of their business.

Automatic car washing faces a fundamental drawback of using the same set of brushes on a number of vehicles. And the dirt and debris get caught up in the pores of these brushes on a structural level. So, when the same brushes are used on your car, they, in addition to removing major dirt, also generate micro-scratches on your paintwork. It basically acts as benign sandpaper when clogged with dirt. And your shiny new car’s paintwork gets full of swirls in no time.

Most of the automatic car washing services do a terrible job of drying out the water from the paintwork. That moisture, when stays on the surface of the car on its journey, attracts dirt and particles more easily. Also, if you take such a poorly dried car directly into the sun, it can bake the moisture into your car’s paint, leaving water smudges on the paintwork. These smudges can be tiring to take out later.

Automatic car washing has also evolved to cater to these drawbacks. Newer brushless car washing services offer cleaning with high-pressure water jets coupled with advanced shampoos and detergents. They use pressurized air to get rid of the left moisture. And then they are mostly hand-dried through a cloth.

Although brushless car washers’ procedure is way better than the ones equipped with brushes, they still struggle to reach all the surfaces. When these cars are often hand-dried by workers, they often tend to use the same cloth over a dozen cars and have a careless attitude when handling the cloth to wipe off any dirt on the floor. But the amount of damage done has decreased significantly.

Although nothing can compete with a good old hand wash with your own clean equipment done with the proper procedures, in our busy lives we tend to find a quicker and easier solution. So, in order to ensure that your car’s paint remains shiny and swirl-free for a good amount of time, it’s better to opt for a brushless car washer and dry the car under your own supervision. It’s a better practice to take your own clean microfiber towel from home and provide it to the worker to dry the car afterward.