The last cab company I worked for had a car wash in the yard that usually managed to make the car dirtier than it was before it was washed. But that was their 'standard', it was free and I really didn't care so...
I don't really know exactly what a 'full service car wash' means but I do know that car washes with optional polishing and interior cleaning are available here in Norway because I see signs for them in the next town to where I live. I imagine that they are much less common than in the US simply because wages here are high. But they do exist.
And of course we have the kind where you wash the car yourself using a high pressure water jet in addition to the drive through kind (both those with and without brushes).
These car washes are not simple, nor cheap. They aren't talking about places where you wash your own car, they're talking about the increase in automated ones.
Interesting observation. I do use a car wash, not frequently enough as my car is more often dirty than clean, but I have only ever paid cash! For context, I currently live in Austria.
I've spent $200 - $350 on car detailing as a service several times now. They drive to your home and work on your car for several hours to get it looking brand new.
As someone who drives an SUV, has dogs in the car frequently, and gets my vehicle muddy on the inside, this is a fantastic service.
A bunch of my neighbors use the exact same service.
> Removing the chalk, according to BoA, cost a few thousand dollars.
When I was a kid I used to wash cars for $8-10. A few thousand dollars? Pay 10 year old me a few hundred and I'd wash it every weekend. Forget the car washing business.
>> No car with paint you care about should ever be washed in the sun.
> Are you being serious?
Probably given "If you look around some detailer forums". I've seen the don't wash in the sun part, but it is about getting the "perfect" clean and not damage. The damage prevention parts usually involve reducing the amount of dirt and grit be rubbed against the paint like foam cannons, multiple buckets/clothes/mitts, grates, clay, etc.
> I have never heard of cars being washed in any other way.
I have a feeling you two are looking at it from vastly different perspectives. You seem to have a more utilitarian view of car washing. You know your car is going to receive damage as you use it. Minor scratches and fading that you have to inspect for are the least of your worries. The other person seems to view cars as important status symbols and any "easily" seen imperfection is a blemish.
* Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner.*
People who don't wash their cars just don't care enough about their cars to wash them. That's it. Also, finding a good house cleaner is not the same as a good car washer. You can stroll into a tunnel type car wash any day of the week and not have to worry about a thing. Having a stranger come into your home to clean is really stressful. Congrats on finding a good service provider for that.
shalmanese 2 hours ago | link | parent | flag
I'm not a car owner so I have no stake in this fight but I feel the need to rebut some of the claims:
* Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner.
* Staffing is hard but I think you exaggerate how hard it is. Lyft has managed to solve this problem successfully and I would argue Exec has as well so this is at least two existence proofs. Postmates and Instacart also seem to have solved this problem but I haven't had enough datapoints to confirm.*
Have you ever had a car washing business? How did you fare with finding a good staff?
* Proper incentive structures can trivially solve the cancellation problem. Just charge a cancellation fee if you cancel within an hour of cleaning.*
Oh charge a fee you say? How do you think I will do that? Credit card? Then I have to deal with chargebacks and lose even more money than not doing anything. Mail them an invoice? Not going to work. Please provide some insight into this because I do want to learn how you would do this.
* Some people are going to be fucktards the best way to deal with it is to just treat it as a statistical phenomena and price it into your model. There are lots of things you can do to bias the natural level of fraud but, anecdotally, companies I've talked to seem to report that just "has to own a smartphone" is enough to cut fraud by a significant amount.*
My model could only be priced at a given rate because of competition. By pricing in fucktards I would be pricing myself out of non-fucktards.
* Barring certain mathematical proofs, it's impossible to prove that a startup won't work, only that it hasn't yet. The reason to spend $5M is that if you discover a way that it could work that nobody else had the patience/foresight to discover, it could be worth many multiples of that.*
You are right. But it does not take 5.25 million dollars to prove that Cherry would not work. Just a couple of thousands to test at a local market. In fact, most startups these days don't need millions of dollars to prove their business model. They just need thousands, not millions. Thats why YC only gives people a small bit of money as seed. They know that there is no need to spend that much. Where you do need money is to scale the operations and that varies a lot from business to business. Cherry would have been able to scale without much money, because they did not do anything themselves (the sub contracted the work).
I do appreciate that you took the time to reply, but I have real world experience with this, whereas you only are speculating while using Silicon Valley startup logic to it. Doesn't apply (hardly ever, actually).
> Good. Washing work vehicles so that they are always sparkling seems like a waste of resources.
The point of the clean truck is that it shows the delivery company it willing to lose money to maintain their equipment. It means they are probably also willing to lose money to care for your package better.
It's the same reason Lexus requires their mechanics to wear white lab coats. To show you that they are willing to spend money to take care of your stuff.
Yeah, not around here though. My estimate is based on how long a wash takes and allowing for people not washing as frequently at night at the wash attached to my local gas station. This is a rural area.
However my neighbor used to own a chain of car washes in the suburbs and going by his 11,000 sq-ft house, I'm guessing it was pretty profitable!
I've been thinking about this same phenomenon. I reside in Norway, where, interestingly, five different car washes opened in 2023 within a 2 km radius of my local neighborhood. Remarkably, four of these are clustered within a 300m stretch inside a commercial park. Our local area has a population of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 people.
Each car wash is operated by a different entity, offering unique apps and subscription plans.
It's hard to imagine this being profitable given the circumstances. But what do I know, I wash my own car.
This is simply not true, at least in the more densely populated parts of Norway. They are simply very expensive.
reply