Why Our Platinum Wash is Superior to Other Car Washes

Cleaner Quicker EXPRESS WASH PACKAGES

All our Tunnel Express washes include FREE SELF SERVE VACUUMS for you to use (the same ones we use for our detailing) – powerful, quiet, easy-to-use- plus a 72 HOUR RAIN CHECK- if it rains in the next 3 days bring your vehicle back with your receipt and we’ll wash it again for FREE.

• We are SAFER – Our neoprene-like brushes don’t absorb water and are constantly rinsed clean so they don’t hold grit and dirt like the cloth brushes used by most carwashes; won’t scratch or mar your finish and scrub off wax like gritty cloth; won’t get heavier to increase risks of damage to tops and protrusions.  We also take special care in our hand preps to avoid fine scratches by using prepping brushes made with animal hair rather than synthetic bristles.  This is why many of our regular customers have never used an automated car wash before, but use us because they are confident our tunnel will not mar the finish on their vehicles.
• We are CLEANER- Our  three sets of neoprene-like brushes do a sensational cleaning job and we have 19 cleaning and conditioning treatments in our tunnel, more than anyone in the entire region, and are the only ones that offer significant hand prep and all washes have towel touch up.  We have both a top brush and wheel brushes, whereas many washes use sprays even though the Arizona sun bakes grime on the top surfaces and wheels. We top it off with our high pressure arch whose fine-spray nozzles give double the cleaning power of normal arches and get into tiny cracks as well, but use only half the water.
• We PROTECT  the beauty and function of your vehicle’s finish. Unlike many car washes, we thoroughly treat our water so it won’t leave any minerals or contaminants that build up over time to create a fine, friction-producing layer on your car’s finish that dulls the shine, holds on to dirt, and doesn’t give a lasting bond to wax. Your car looks older, gets dirtier quicker, and wax sluffs off sooner. To avoid this dilemma, we first soften our water to remove all minerals, then double charcoal filter it, and finally purify it even further by reverse osmosis to 000 particles per million purity. And the clearcoat, RainX, and Carnauba wax we use are the best products in their class. The patented RainX we use is good up to 570 degrees, so it can withstand sitting in the blistering Arizona sun all day.  The Armor All Carnauba wax we use is carnauba rich (there are no labelling standards in the car wash industry so not all brands are the same) so that it not only gives an extreme shine but also helps slough off dirt to keep your vehicle clean longer as well as protect its finish.
• We are QUICKER – our tunnel only takes 2 1/2 minutes for all washes; our express lane has a self-serve touch screen terminal so you can be in and out in as little as 5 minutes. Or you can do a fast touch up to the interior with the powerful vacuums we make available with all our washes for free.
• We keep it SIMPLE – We offer 3 washes – Silver, Gold and Platinum Washes, with from 7 to 16 treatments.
• We provide VALUE- On any apples and apples comparison our washes offer more for the money. Our basic Silver wash has 7 treatments including the undercarriage. Our Gold has 14 treatments including wheel brushes in the tunnel and hand prep of the tough-to-clean back end. Our Platinum is a combination hand and tunnel wash with a complete hand prep of tough-to-clean-areas and substances and 19 total treatments. It is better than a hand wash with the undercarriage wash and high pressure arch, plus has clearcoat, RainX and Carnauba  wax- at less than half the price of a hand wash alone.

Express Interior Detail Options

At Cleaner Quicker we do real Details on an express drive-in basis, the more superficial touch-ups of “Full Service” operators, who usually schedule such details in advance. We do them faster than most comparable details because we treat them like a manufacturing process in a factory. We dissect an express detail into each of its discrete tasks, then define the order they must be done in for maximum efficiency, and then develop time standards for tasks, and then test them for reasonableness. New employees are trained first with a training package that breaks out each detail, it’s steps and time standards, and then train side by side with an experienced employee to coach them. The first priority is quality- doing the entire detail completely every time. Then they learn to do it faster without sacrificing quality. They use small kitchen timers- first set to 60% of the time standard for the detail to give them a warning of how they are doing. Later they monitor their own times with the timers, relying on the “Hawthorne Effect” (when you time an activity regularly you tend to get faster automatically) and it works. As a result, we do our cleaning details in way shorter time for comparable work in typical detail shops, which is why we can do them on a drive-in basis.

Simply combine your Express Wash with your Interior Hand Detail to get the total price.

Pricing for different size vehicles

WHY DO WE CHARGE MORE FOR SOME VEHICLES THAN OTHERS?

We adjust our pricing based on the size and condition of the vehicle because it has a dramatic effect on the time and materials it takes us to complete the service and thus directly determines our cost for that service.

SIZE

We use a standard sedan as our base for costing out services, and than adjust it for larger vehicles.

To use an analogy, if you had a 5000 square foot house with 10 foot windows would you expect someone to clean it for you for the same price as a 3500 square foot house with 8 foot windows? Certainly not. Why not just use an average? The owner of a large vehicle would like that but the owner of a smaller sedan would undoubtedly not like paying more than his real cost demanded so his larger cousin could pay less than his. We want the pricing to be fair for everyone, both our customers and ourselves.

We estimated our costs by estimating differences in the surface to be cleaned for numerous cars, using Consumer Reports dimensions, Car and Driver annual dimensions summary, and then checked it by measuring a good number of different types of vehicles ourselves. We found that vehicle sizes tended to cluster into a number of groups,  so we established a series of categories with similar cleaning requirements to simplify pricing. Those categories are shown on our size-price chart with examples of vehicles in each category. Prices for our various detailing services are shown in the column below each category.

We estimated our time differences for different vehicles by timing ourselves doing it for a wide variety of vehicles and noting material differences. That gave a good cost base.

We then set our price size increases for less than what they would be if we adjusted our base sedan prices the same proportion as the size increases for larger vehicles. First, because there is some portion of time spent that is the same for any vehicle regardless of size, such as set up, parking, and moving. Second, we recognized that the incremental time for a larger surface was not 100% variable once you had started on a section, although material costs were, so we raised the price less than the proportionate size increase.

CONDITION

We based our times on the typical condition of vehicles coming in- they need a clean, but are not a mess. If they are extremely dirty or filled with clutter it takes considerably longer so we may charge a bit more to cover that. If they are very muddy it poses a special challenge. The mud must be removed by hand before running the car in the tunnel or the mud would get the equipment and the cars behind it dirty. In addition we cannot wash the mud down the drain for environmental reasons. It takes us longer to shovel it out of the pit and cart it off in plastic bags than it does to take it off the vehicle.

Tar and backed on sap are usually too tough to remove even with the hand prep at the tunnel entrance for our Platinum so they are treated like a detail item and priced separately.

Bugs are a constant challenge for our customers and us. They must be removed by hand to really get them off and not damage the car’s finish, and that is usually hard work requiring special solvents, brushes, and sponges. It is part of the hand prep in our Platinum wash. However, not everyone with bugs always needs everything else in the Platinum wash each time, so we save the customer money by letting them add the hand bug removal as an a la carte option to a cheaper wash if they wish. The full hand prep is also available a la carte for the same reason.