Seven Signs Your Car Needs Detailing

Most people book a detail when the car looks dirty. By then it has usually needed one for months. These are the signs that washing has stopped being enough, in roughly the order they show up.

One, Clean Paint That Still Feels Rough

Wash the car, dry it, then run your fingertips over a horizontal panel through a thin plastic bag. If it feels like fine sandpaper, that is bonded contamination: iron from brake dust, tar, tree sap and industrial fallout.

Soap will not touch it. It needs decontamination, and it is the clearest single sign a car is due.

Two, Fine Circular Scratches In Direct Sun

Park in full sun and look across a bonnet or a boot lid at an angle. Those fine swirling scratches are wash marring, put there by grit dragged across the paint by brushes, dirty wash media, or drying with the wrong towel.

They are the reason dark cars look flat and grey rather than deep. Washing will not remove them, only machine polishing will.

Three, Water Stopped Beading

If rain sheets across the paint and sits in flat patches rather than beading and rolling off, whatever protection was on there has worn away. From that point the clear coat is taking everything directly.

Four, Glass That Never Comes Clean

Streaks that reappear every time, especially on the inside of the windscreen, are a film rather than dirt. Off-gassing from the dash builds a haze that ordinary glass cleaner smears around instead of removing.

Five, The Cabin Has A Smell You Stopped Noticing

Odour lives in the carpet, the seat foam and the ventilation system, not in the air. Air fresheners cover it for a day. Someone getting into your car for the first time notices it immediately, which matters a great deal if you are selling.

Six, Yellow Or Cloudy Headlights

The factory UV coating on the lens has broken down. It scatters the beam instead of projecting it, so less light lands on the road, and it makes the whole front of the car read as older than it is.

Seven, You Are About To Sell It

This one is not about condition, it is about timing. Buyers decide in the first ten seconds, from listing photos and then from a walk around. Corrected paint photographs differently to swirled paint, and a tidy engine bay reads as a car that has been looked after.

If two or three of these sound like your car, it is past what a wash can fix. Send through what you drive and what is bothering you, and we will tell you which stages it actually needs.