How to Properly Clean, Maintain and Polish your new car so it looks brand new after ten years use.  Mine does! And its easy. The devil is in the details as usual. You bought your lovely new car or van and you want to make it look as good as humanly possible and to keep it that way for many years easily?

Most new vehicles arrive "clean-ish" but basically undamaged but things like the engine bay and where the doors open and close and maybe grills and some other dirt traps will still be dirty. Look also for overspray and areas of dull paint or any delivery damage.

If any are found then get back to the company that supplied it because its not supposed to be like that. 

It may be easier to wash the vehicle carefully first especially if its a used car. See washing! 

•  It absorbs all the salt and surfactants in common household detergents, (salt used to thicken it and make housewives think its better value!) which also strip all the oils and waxes out of your paint, 
  
  NEVER ever use household detergents! Always use purpose designed wash and wax and use as LITTLE as possible. You don't need detergents other than to remove grease and heavy deposits. All they do is remove all the wax and natural oils from the surface of the paint and leave it dull and porous.
  

• It NEEDS to have a coat of wax and not be finely scratched to maintain that "as new" gloss and shine without any swirl marks in it. 
  
  I am presuming that it already has a perfect shine at least one of lower quality if its a brand new car -  If not then you need will need to wash it, tee-cut or compound all marks and fine scratches away first and then wax to get a deep shine which is hard work. But you need only do this a) if it needs it and b) once!. -  Personally I use Farecla G10 for the fine polishing to remove and marks and scratches. Its a very fine quality abrasive. Designed to be used with a power polishing pad but it also works by hand if you have the energy. Buy it easily on eBay!  And then wax using any quality car wax. I use Autoglym here but there are many good waxes. But before you do that you will need to wash it!  The first essential item you really need then is a water butt!  Go buy one!
  

• A barrel or even three or more if you don't get much rain.  Reason - Because tap water has everything from chlorine to lime scale in it. 
  
  Don't wreck your new paint with tap water if you don't have to! 
  
  Go to a Hardware store for a water butt to catch the rain. It is not expensive and you will save your paint, lots of extra work & time and the planet! (Like I care!)
  
  Try this simple experiment if you don't believe me.  Get a black tile or something. Clean and polish it. Drip some tap water on it. Then get another and drip some rain water on it.  Leave both somewhere to dry.  You will see!  The tap water leaves hard to remove white marks (limescale and other dissolved salts) whereas the rain water leaves almost nothing behind. The surface that was wet with rainwater hardly needs a wipe and dries clean and shiny. Rain water is after all basically distilled water. If it gets dirty from your roof then the barrel fixes that! The impurities will either sink to the bottom, or float to the top and be removed as the barrel overflows during heavy rain. Either way they do not end up in your bucket!
  

• As tap water dries on your perfect paint it leaves a layer of very abrasive salts and limescale.  As you polish or wipe this off you scratch the paint - limescale is a good abrasive!  Thousands of fine scratches. It doesn't happen all at once but after a few washes you will begin to see swirl marks and many fine scratches if you look closely.
  

• NEVER wash a car unless its cool. It has to be cool enough so that about 99 percent of the rinse water runs off naturally. Water that runs off after rinsing leaves no marks. It cant because its not there! Water that DRIES on your warm car leaves all its dissolved solids, salts and dissolved limescale behind on your paintwork and glass. Best time is just at dusk on a cool day overcast day. Or very early morning.  You don't want the water drying on the car! Because it will dry horrible and wiping or polishing scratches your paint. Get this right and you don't need to actually use a cloth on your car at all. 
  
  The more that runs off due to the hopefully well waxed smooth shiny and cold paint the better it will dry.  If done properly using little to no detergent, rainwater, on a waxed polished car then it should dry so well that the next day you will barely need a towel to wipe away any marks and will look as if you spent hours waxing it all over again. WITHOUT any of the work or  the fine scratches that this inevitably causes.
  

• Use only quality purpose bought Car Wash & Wax products  (I use Autoglym car wash detergent but any half decent wash and wax car shampoo is fine)  Remember its only required to use as much detergent as needed to remove any road film or oily dirt and to JUST break down the waters surface tension.. The simple rule is that the less detergent you use the less you damage the paint as well as the rubber door seals etc. Less is more. As as all detergents strip off the wax from the car.
  
  So less will always look better and be easier to polish off and dry shinier and cleaner!   If you can get away with almost plain water from the water butt (rain water) better still!  Rain water dries much cleaner and leaves hardly a mark on your car. See picture of the water butts I use.
  

• Always use good large sponges. Buy half a dozen. If you drop one on the floor throw it away now! You can never get all the fine sharp particles out of it no matter how hard you wash it and it will cause the dreaded swirl marks all over your paintwork.  Use a different one for the places where abrasive muck and grease and brake dust accumulate. Keep one only for that job and don't mix them up!  When washing start at the top, roof and bonnet (hood?) and work around the vehicle. Do ONE panel thoroughly and carefully at a time. Do all the cracks and crevices and the bits where the doors open etc as fast as you can. The aim is to get all of it done (washed) as soon as you can so that the first bits you washed don't get chance to start to dry before rinsing!   Now starting with the top, and then the other body panels as fast as poss. Get it rinsed with a clean bucket and your precious rainwater. Its possible to buy rinse aid.  I use it mixed into the rainwater but its not essential.  It should run off your car and leave almost dry panels. If it doesn't you are either washing it while the temperature is too warm, or your car needs a re-wax!

DO NOT use a wash-leather.  No matter how careful you are they are by their very nature both abrasive and trap dirt particles and also the dreaded lime scale.  Another bad idea!  If you want perfect paint and not have to re-wax or anything do what I did! 

Buy yourself  a cheap 4 stroke leaf blower!  (don't get a two stroke one because they spit out oily particles!) It blows the water out of all the cracks, grills and door shuts, etc very easily!

And after about 4 minutes your car or van will be dry!  Far more effective than any scratchy old wash-leather!  And faster as well as more fun!  A blokes wash leather! Faster and much more effective as it blows water out of all the areas a wash leather or towel cannot get to. Clears the drive and garden too!

Next just to finish off use the next thing you needed to go and buy, Towels! I bought 6 large soft hand towels on eBay for about 10 UK pounds. They are great for finishing off and giving the vehicle a finish off "wipe". Don't buy anything else because nothing else - not even microfible cloths - work as well. Buy ones the same colour as your car. The dust that comes off them cannot be seen when using for polishing!  If you drop one, Throw it away or use it for your house. Or at the very least don't use until its been washed VERY THOROUGHLY.  Dirty drying and polishing cloths are another reason for all the fine scratches everybody else's cars seem to have! 

Even on a ten year old car I have none at all and because I keep all the rubber and plastic parts clean without using lots of detergent they too all look as new. Detergent is the enemy of most of your car! Use as little as possible.

Waxing your vehicle properly is in part 2 below

Part 1  |  Part 2