Why Should You Care To Have Your Vehicle Detailed?

On the surface, this question doesn’t seem terribly complicated. You should care to have your vehicle detailed to keep it clean and performing to its highest potential.

Shortest post ever, signing off …

Not actually! This one’s sort of long. Settle in. Maybe grab a snack.

Sometimes people get caught in the “well, HOW do I keep it clean and performing optimally”? We have several “How Do We Do It” posts that explain our processes. Hopefully, those provide useful tips for all of you, DIY people. That said, we won’t get into the “how”. Instead, we’ll focus on the “why”.

Why should you care to have your vehicle detailed?

One of the coolest parts of being a ’90s kid was the whole idea of really taking pride in the things you had. Maybe it was less about being a ’90s kid and more about being a blue-collar, latchkey kid of a Boomer.

No disrespect to the Boomers, those are our parents and our children’s grandparents. We value them!

As mentioned, that Boomer-instilled mindset drove ’90s kids to neatly catalog trading cards, clean compact discs, clean and waterproof our K-Swiss, and in my case detail toy cars. It wouldn’t be until the turn of the millennium before we ‘90s kids had our very own actual vehicles to detail.

A quick-ish Justin story …

That 1988 Chevy was mine - almost! It would be two full paychecks before I’d pay my parents back the $500 they fronted me for the purchase.

What a day though!

I had this awesome job at Westlake Hardware in midtown Omaha working with my best friends. One evening, Mom shows up with my brother during a very exhausting 4-9p late night shift. I don’t remember exactly what trickery had to transpire that would’ve allowed me to leave my assigned post, likely dusting packages of various hardware, but I was somehow able to slip the clutches of my manager. I escaped out the front door where I laid my eyes on her …

… my very own car!

At first, I was in disbelief. Like, I knew it was maybe going to happen but since we were on the struggling end of the blue-collar spectrum - a $500 loan may as well have been a throwaway request.

This was truly a surprise.

I’d be willing to bet that precisely zero people in all of human history would designate the 1988 Chevy Celebrity as their dream car. It wasn’t that I wanted this car specifically.

I wanted A car.

I wanted freedom.

I wanted a tool that would allow me to meet up with my friends wherever we wanted to.

I wanted to be able to roll all the windows down in my own car while vibing to Bitter Sweet Symphony as loud as I could …

… before I found myself learning how to install new speakers.

I wanted to drive.

Buying a car you most definitely wouldn’t buy if you could afford absolutely anything cooler is analogous to entering an arranged marriage. You really have to learn to love it and treat it like it’s the red Ferrari F50 you actually dreamt of having as your own. You don’t just haphazardly place multi-colored push pins to hold your drooping headliner up. No, you use your employee discount to purchase multiple multi-colored push pin packs, separate out all the red pins, then neatly and in pattern position your maroon headliner up into place as if this is how Chevy intended to present this vehicle. This meticulous headliner project was preceded by thoroughly removing any and all traces of previous ownership. No crevice would be left untouched, even if it meant wiping too much of the maroon dye from the dash accidentally. That was my trench - that’s where I cut my teeth, learning how to detail.

Also, this was 90’s Omaha, midwest USA. The paint of the era was absolutely no match for the copious amounts of sand and salt covering the roads for months every year of this Celebrity’s life, from one millennium to the next - actually.

The paint was peppered with rust spots, some small, some with a diameter similar to a softball. None of them were rusted all the way through so to work I went, learning how to detail exteriors. We take things for granted today. Youtube wouldn’t exist, let alone contain useful content for several years. I had to phone a friend. Nope, I didn’t text my friend or even use a cell phone. This call likely came from one of the expansion handsets of our cordless phone setup at our house. This friend introduced me to body filler.

I quickly found out this was bullshit. Not the body filler, but the labor and skill required to work with body filler in a respectable way. It’s hard! Pun is fully intended. It took this one experience to learn how much it hurts your hands to sand, and sand, and sand, and … sand.

Anyway …

The Celebrity turned out pretty acceptable for the work of a 16-year-old kid who was so proud of his red Ferrari F50…er um…splotchy grey Chevy Celebrity.

I loved that car with all I had until Vin Diesel and Paul Walker convinced an entire generation of kids that we needed something, more … Japanese.

The point is this …

It’s got more to do with the pride in your ride. The day you got your vehicle, your whip, your wheels, you were excited! You loved how clean it felt, how great it smelled, and how unbelievably shiny it was.

Detailing a vehicle is not just running through a quick wash and then quickly pulling around to beat a $0.75 vacuum timer. The entire goal of automotive detailing is to factory reset the state of your vehicle’s cleanliness, both inside and out. Just like when I set out to remove any bit of evidence that anyone ever owned that Celebrity before me to make that ‘88 feel like it was new in 2000. I want your vehicle to feel new. I want you to feel better than you did the day you first drove away with it.

So, you should get your vehicle detailed to make me feel better.

Jk.

You should get your vehicle detailed out of respect for your decision to purchase it. You should detail your vehicle to stave off as much entropy as you or your professional detailer is able to.

You should detail your vehicle so that you feel happier in your part of the world.

You should consider letting Rad Wash help so that you can enjoy other shit while we deliver all of that reminiscence.

If you’re a DIY person - love it! Check out our products that might help with your project.

If you’d rather hire us - also love it! Check out our availability.

As always, thank you for being a Rad Fan!

You are amazing!!