Car washing 101! What three factors work together to clean a car?
- Detergent Action
- Pressure
- Friction
For many years touchless (or ‘brushless’) car washes have maintained a reputation as a safer car wash option. Whether they’re set up as an in-bay system where jets move over and around a parked car, or the car is parked and the driver uses a wand to manually blast the car clean, nothing but water touches the vehicle’s exterior.
But there’s a simple, critical problem with this approach: all touchless car washes, by definition, leave out one of the three key factors for car washing: Friction.
After decades of experience with car wash development, wash quality, and engineering, we’ve consistently found that leaving out physical contact with a car during the wash process is exactly like spraying plates with soapy water without scrubbing them down afterward. It just isn’t enough to remove the stubborn, baked-on dirt and grime that cars build up upon the road.
So touchless car wash operators must either settle for less-than-clean vehicles (and dissatisfied customers) OR overcorrect using the two factors they have remaining: DETERGENT, ACTION, and PRESSURE.
This may mean a touchless car wash ramps up the water pressure to an extreme degree, scouring your paint and forcing water into places it shouldn’t go. Or, more often, it means the car wash starts using harsh, concentrated cleaning products injected into the water stream to aggressively break up dirt, mud, and bug smear… and eat at your car’s clear coat as well.
A better, balanced car washing solution
The Tommy’s Express Car Wash system has been engineered specifically to balance all three cleaning factors and provide the safest wash possible. Each element is modernized and has been extensively tested, targeted, and designed to do its job and do it right!
Our 130’ belt layout gives us the space and travel time to arrange equipment and give it the time it needs to work safely. This includes:
The Triple Presoak arch
Three rings with a variety of nozzles to apply metered presoak dilutions set to different sections of your vehicle. The presoak has a few vital seconds to dwell, loosening up grime, before being safely washed away.
All-around friction cleaning modules
Did you know our brushes don’t actually use brushes? Instead, all Tommy’s Express Car Washes use either a closed-cell foam or dense specialty soft cloth material that feels more or less like yarn, but far tougher and more unyielding. Both types are heavily lubricated with body soap on a constant basis during use. You can see for yourself—just watch and see how foamy each touch of our ‘brushes’ leaves your car as you pass through!
The heavy foam application encapsulates and lubricates all the dirt and sand coming off your vehicle, removing it without grinding it into the car’s surface or allowing it to embed in the car wash brushes, which are cleaned and dried daily.
Underbody blasters
A steady stream of water is used to safely remove salt and other buildup from the lower portions of your vehicle, which can help prevent rusting and corrosion—especially during the winter in colder states.
High and low-pressure cleaning and rinse nozzles
These are spaced along the entire length of the car wash in a variety of positions on a number of different pieces of equipment. Each nozzle is carefully metered, used with a carefully monitored level of car wash product, and uses water appropriate for its role; fresh water for most functions, low-pressure reclaimed water for low-priority wheel or rocker panel cleaning, and purified water for our spot-free rinse.
Awesome extras
When you purchase our upper-level wash packages you get more than a great clean! We include UV Body Protectant that works like sunscreen to prevent fading; Hot Wax, which over time provides an increasingly thick, durable protective layer with great shine; and our Tire Gloss which protects and moisturizes the rubber of your vehicles, keeping them looking clean and new!
When you visit Tommy’s Express, you receive one of the most modern, carefully designed and executed car wash services available anywhere. And you get this service at express speeds with short wait times and the convenience of a tag-less monthly membership system controlled on-demand from the free Tommy’s Express app.
If you’ve considered Tommy’s Express in the past but weren’t sure if we were for you, we invite you to give us a try today and see for yourself how we compare!
