What Uber and Lyft drivers should actually pay for cleaning

If you drive for a living, a clean car is not vanity. It is your rating, and your rating is your income. But most detailing advice is written for someone who drives 12,000 kilometres a year and parks in a garage. You do not. So here is the version for a car that carries strangers all day.

The short answer

For most working drivers, the routine that actually holds up is:

• A Mini Detail every two to three weeks. Wash outside, full vacuum and wipe-down inside, about 45 to 60 minutes.
• A single seat shampoo whenever one seat gets ruined. Not the whole cabin. One seat.
• Exterior washes in between, weekly through winter.

That is it. The expensive services have their place, but they are the exception, and one of them will cost you a day of earnings. More on that below.

How the driver rate works

Rideshare, taxi and accessibility drivers get 20% off the Mini Detail, seat shampoos, the Max Detail and Showroom Service. Show your driver app at the counter, that is the whole process. No card, no signup, no expiry.

Two things worth knowing so the number on screen is not a surprise:

• It does not stack with the 10% online discount. You get the better of the two, not both. For anything on the driver list, that is the 20%.
• The exterior wash is not on the driver list. It is $20 for a sedan already. You still get the 10% for booking online, so $18.

What you actually pay

Sedan pricing, booked online, with the driver rate applied:

SUVs and larger vehicles price up from there by size band, and the total is on screen before you commit. The Full Revamp is already a driver-only price, so the 20% does not come off it again.

Buy the seat, not the cabin

This is the one that saves drivers the most money over a year, and almost nobody asks for it.

Saturday night happens to one seat. A spill, a smell, something worse. The instinct is to book a full interior job for the whole car, which is $144 at the driver rate. But the rest of the cabin is fine. You need one seat fixed, and one seat is $40.

Pick how many seats when you book, one to four. We do them properly, one at a time, and you are back out earning the same day.

The service that costs you a day

The Max Detail is a genuinely good job and drivers do sometimes need it. But read this part before you book it.

The car stays with us for 24 hours afterwards. The work itself is about two hours, but a full interior shampoo soaks the carpets and seats, and they have to dry under supervision. If we hand you a damp car the same afternoon, you get in the next morning and it smells worse than when you arrived.

For a driver that is not a two-hour service, it is a lost shift. So book it on your day off, not on a Thursday morning because the cabin looks tired. If the cabin just looks tired, that is a Mini Detail and you are back on the road in an hour.

What not to buy

We will say no to this at the counter, so we may as well say it here.

• Long ceramic coatings on a high-kilometre rideshare car. A three-year coating is real protection and it is priced accordingly, but it only pays back on a car you are keeping and caring for. If the car is doing 60,000 kilometres a year of stop-and-go with strangers in it, put that money into washing it more often.
• Anything on a car you are handing back. If you are leasing and the term is nearly up, clean it, do not protect it.
• The whole cabin when one seat is the problem. Covered above, but it is worth repeating, because it is the most common overspend we see.

Timing, so you are not sitting around

Weekday mornings are the fast slots. We keep in-and-out capacity open then specifically for drivers, because sitting in a waiting room during the morning airport run is expensive in a way a $16 discount does not fix.

We are a hand-wash shop, not a conveyor belt, and we have done 120 cars in a single day, so a busy morning does not scare us. Book the slot, drop it, we will text you.

If you run more than one car

Fleets, taxi and limo operators, dealership lots and buses are all on recurring schedules with volume pricing agreed up front and one monthly invoice. That is a different conversation than the driver rate, and it is on the Uber/Lyft & Dealers page. Tell us the fleet size and vehicle types and we will quote within a day.