How often should you detail your car? A Scarborough guide

The honest answer is that it depends on how you drive, where you park, and what you can live with. But “it depends” is not a schedule, so here is a real one for a car that lives through a Scarborough year.

The short version

For a normal car, normally used:

• Exterior wash: every 2 weeks, and weekly through winter.
• Interior vacuum and wipe-down: once a month.
• Full interior shampoo: twice a year, or the moment something spills or smells.
• Underwash to clear road salt: monthly from December to April.
• Polish or ceramic top-up: once a year, if you are protecting the paint.

Everything on that list is published on our services page, so you can see exactly what each step costs before you book.

The outside: every two weeks, more in winter

Dirt is not just cosmetic. Bird droppings, tree sap and road film are mildly acidic, and left on the clear coat in the sun they etch it. A wash every couple of weeks keeps that from ever starting. An exterior hand wash is $20 for a sedan and takes about 20 to 30 minutes, so it is the cheapest insurance you will buy for the car all year.

Winter changes the math. Between December and April the roads are salted, and salt is the one thing that does real structural damage. That is a weekly wash, and it is worth adding an underwash to rinse the underbody where you cannot see the salt building up. We wrote a whole post on what road salt does and when to wash it off, because it is the maintenance most people skip and regret.

The inside: monthly, and shampoo twice a year

A vacuum and a wipe of the dash, console and door panels once a month keeps grit from grinding into the plastics and the carpet fibres. That is a $60 interior detail, about 30 to 40 minutes, same day.

Twice a year, or any time the cabin has absorbed a spill, a smell or a winter of salt in the carpets, step up to a full shampoo. That is the Max Detail. The car stays with us for 24 hours afterwards so the seats and carpets dry properly under supervision, which is the difference between a shampoo that fixes the smell and one that traps it.

When a wash should become a detail

Book more than a wash when you notice any of these:

• The steering wheel and shifter feel tacky. That is skin oil and it needs more than a wipe.
• The carpets have gone stiff or you can see white salt lines. That is a shampoo, not a vacuum.
• The paint feels rough when you run a clean hand over it. That is bonded contamination, and it is what a polish removes.
• There is a smell you cannot place. That is bacteria or mould in the vents, and a steam wash is what clears it.

Why a plan is cheaper than catching up

The expensive cars to clean are the ones nobody touched for a year. Salt that sat all winter, a spill that dried into the carpet, sap that etched the paint. Each of those turns a $20 wash into a much bigger job. Regular, small maintenance is always cheaper than the rescue.

That is the whole idea behind our memberships. From $45 a month you get recurring hand washes and member pricing on everything else, so the routine happens without you having to think about it. If you are the sort of person who means to wash the car and then does not, a plan is the fix.

What “by hand” has to do with it

Frequency only helps if the wash itself is not doing harm. Automatic brush tunnels are quick and cheap, but the brushes drag grit across your paint and leave the fine swirl marks you see under the sun. We wash and finish every car by hand, the way we have since 1996, which is why washing often actually keeps the paint looking better instead of slowly hazing it.