Regular washing and care can add hundreds of dollars to your car's value at sale time.

THE EXPERT SAYS

Meguiar’s car care products, strongly recommends the once-a-week cleaning ritual.

“It is very important to keep it up. No matter where you live — in the country, city or by the coast — Australia is a very harsh environment for vehicles. The elements just eat away at them. A weekly wash can protect them from this,” the specialist says.

Of course, there are hundreds of outlets around Australia who will do all this for you.

Claudio Roda, managing director of Magic Hand Car Wash in North Melbourne, will charge you between $25 and $30 for the job, depending on the size and level of service you want performed on your car. It takes around 20 minutes, and you can sip a coffee or enjoy a snack sitting down while overall-clad professionals swarm around your pride-and-joy. They’re obliged to be as thorough as you wish, even getting down-and-dirty between the wheel arches and boot cavities.

In some areas around Oz, mandatory water restrictions have been a real boost for folk like Claudio. “My business has increased by at least 10 per cent since the restrictions came in,” he said.

It seems that hand car wash centers have really taken the pain and confusion out of how to save water while still driving a clean car. 


FOUR TIMES A YEAR — WAX ON, WAX OFF

If you’re a regular daily driver who covers around 20,000km a year, your car can use all the help it can get in our tough climate.

The car-clean professionals, like Chris Robson of Carrera Car Wash Cafe in South Melbourne, charge around $90 to take the pain and the strain out of all the wax-goes-on, wax-goes-off hard work. But getting up-close and personal with your vehicle can really help strengthen the automotive bonds too, so don’t be too put off by a bit of hard yakka and elbow grease.