About

I park on the street in New York City. No hose, no driveway, no garage. Whatever gets done to the car gets done standing next to it at the curb, with what I can carry out of the building.

The car is a Jeep Grand Cherokee and it commutes on the highway. That combination is the whole design brief for this site, and it's worth being specific about it, because it's why the advice here differs from most of what you'll find:

• Highway miles lay down a film that rain does not lift. If your car only does short trips, you have an easier problem than I do.
• Four months a year the roads are salted, and the salt goes where you can't see it — arches, seams, the underside.
• The tap water here is soft, about 1–2 grains per gallon. Most detailing advice about water spots and distilled water was written for hard-water cities. It doesn't apply here, and it may not apply to you.

I'm not a detailer. No shop, no booth, no certification, no sponsor, no van. I'm someone who had one specific problem — keep a street-parked car swirl-free with no water supply of my own — and worked it out carefully instead of guessing.

That's the only claim this site makes, and it's the one that matters: every recommendation here was worked out on that car, at that curb, in that weather. The dilutions on the mixing card are the ones I actually mix. The routine in the Quick Start is the one I actually run. Nothing here is theoretical, and nothing here is a repackaged product description.

It also means the site knows what it doesn't know, and says so. The bay directory tags every entry with how it was checked and whether I have physically stood in it — and it publishes the addresses that turned out not to be car washes at all, because that's what I'd have wanted before driving out to one. Amenities I haven't confirmed are marked unknown rather than guessed.

The guides are living documents. When a product changes, a better method turns up, or the real world disagrees with the plan, they get updated rather than defended. If something here is wrong, it's wrong on my car first.

Have a hose? Most of this still applies to you — the hose just replaces the bay. Look for the "Have a hose?" callouts on each page for what changes.

When something changes, I'll tell you what and where

A bay gets verified, the wash log contradicts a guide, a product I recommend changes formula — that's when a note goes out, and it says what changed and which page it changed on. Roughly monthly, often less, sometimes not for a season. No sequence, no course, nothing to buy.

Email address

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