Why You Should Never Take Your Car to an Automatic Car Wash

It’s springtime! Time to start working on your project car, learn a new wrenching skill, learn how things work under the hood, or just spruce up your daily driver. All month, we’ll be looking back at our best informative, maintenance and DIY articles from Jalopnik’s near 20-year history to get your ride ready for the road. Welcome to the Jalopnik Spring Tune-Up.

Every winter, it’s important to get road salt off your car as soon as possible if you don’t want it turning into rusty dust. The best way to do that is to just wash it all off, but heaven help you if you go to an automatic carwash. We spoke to an expert to find out why.

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I must say this whole article was spurred by a conversation I had with Road & Track’s Sam Smith. Sam is a beloved and dear friend, a Jalopnik alum, and a Notorious Trickster Who Should Never Be Trusted. So when I proudly posted photos of my new-to-me Lexus going through the automatic car wash for the first time, I was utterly perplexed by his eloquent proclamation that “brushless no-paintfuck is a lie perpetrated by Big Flappywheel.”

As elucidating as Sam can be, I wasn’t really able to decipher the reasoning for his rage through all the sniffles. The carwash was brushless, the sign before the big, gaping maw of whirring machines assured me. All of these fears were old hat, spurred on by the myths of yesteryear, I told myself.

I would proudly set my Lexus into its gentle jaws and be rid of the salty death chewing away at its metal underside. I was in the clear.

Or so I thought.

Wrong. At least according to Paul Lamberty, who is responsible for “all automotive OEM and refinish coatings research and development within North America” for BASF, a top-tier paint and finishings supplier to the automotive industry.

In short, Lamberty knows about paint, and he knows about how it reacts to going through an automatic carwash.

“It’s like painting your car with a wet sandblaster,” Lamberty told me over the phone. The problem isn’t really the bristles, he noted — it doesn’t really matter whether or not you automatic carwash is “brushless,” or if it uses bristles, or if it uses giant floppy foamy things to gracefully slop away dirt.

The problem is all of the crud, dirt and other “media” that clings to those brushes / bristles / noodles from all the other cars that ran through the carwash before you.