Car Care Products

Are all Car Wash Shampoos equal, the answer is an absolute NO. In the world of washing your car you can easily come across the good, the bad and the ugly in shampoos.

Firstly pH; this is the acidity or alkalinity of the solution, a lot of cheap car washes are quite high in pH or have a high alkalinity. This is primarily designed to strip dirt off the car’s surface fast, unfortunately it also has the effect of stripping your protection (wax or sealant) off as well, leaving the car unprotected and making it more likely to get dirtier faster. An example of this is dish washing liquid, you see how fast it strips off grease and dried-on food, it will do the same to your lovingly applied wax layers in an instant. So if you want to maintain the looks and the protection on your car make sure your wash shampoo is pH neutral.

Next is concentration; like a number of water based products the dilution differs hugely between brands. A number of off-the-shelf washes are labelled as ‘concentrated’ but are anything but! If you calculate how much wash you need to put in a bucket with how much water, some of even the top names work out to have an approximate dilution rate of 1:120 (meaning you need 1 part of shampoo for every 120 parts of water). If you look at the quality brands then Duragloss Car Wash Concentrate provides an approx 1:300 ration with the likes of Dodo Juice Sour Power providing 1:500 dilution. Then for the real ‘super-concentrates’ of Dodo Juice Supernatural Shampoo or Swissvax Car Bath the dilution is approx 1:1,500 meaning you only need the smallest amount in a wash bucket for the perfect solution. So if you are comparing cost remember that these shampoos might come in bottles of 250ml but if you take the ratio into account that equates to nearly 4 litres of a regular wash shampoo!

And lastly quality; looking at the concentration rates you know that there is now a lot more water in some shampoos than others but what else is there? Some of the off-the-shelf brands are full of cheap ingredients like ‘bulking agents’ to make the shampoo feel thick and add volume, there are ‘Foaming Agents’ to make it very foamy however it is not the foam that cleans it is the cleansers, and sometimes they add ‘Slickeners’ which make the car shiny after, but some of these are bad silicones that can streak and are loathed by bodyshops. The higher quality shampoos actually contain more of the high price ingredients like Dodo Juice Born to be Mild which has some ‘water-softeners’ that act against the minerals in hard water like calcium and magnesium, these can sometimes cause the water spots found after washing.

So all is not equal and you may find that a smaller bottle will actually give you more washes than a larger bottle, and that a quality shampoo will make your wax or protection last longer….