Most mobile car washes and mobile car detailers like to use chamois when cleaning cars. However, the use of terry cloth towels should also be considered. There are several reasons for this, but my biggest reason has always been the speed at which it washes vehicles. You see, with a chamois you have to keep wringing it all the time, and this slows you down significantly.
I can personally wash a personal car like a Toyota Camry, Lexus, or Chevy Malibu in under five minutes. This includes; wet, lather, rinse and dry. Now, let’s talk a little bit about cleaning car lots and car dealerships, where cars are lined up in rows, and there are hundreds of them. In general, you won’t use soap at all, mostly just rinsing, with very little agitation.
In this case, it’s all about production and speed, so using a chamois to dry your cars will slow you down significantly and cost you a lot more money and labor. Not too long ago, a mobile car wash contractor who wanted to get more car wash contracts asked me this question; “Do you use towels to dry off or chamois?”
We used towels because it was much faster, it takes too long to wring out a chamois. However, some of our crews wore chamois. But we also stayed about five cars behind while we cleaned up, giving the cars time to dry a bit. At night we would go to a laundry mat and use the entire laundry room and be in and out in two or three hours. A quick wash without soap and then dry the towels, fold them and leave them for the crew in the morning.
We hired a college student where we could drop off towels and let them do it, then pick them up when they were done. A regular production line and this was much faster and allowed us to do sometimes one out of 2000 cars at a time at car auctions in various cities. We may have 4 or 5 crews bringing their towels for the laundry attendant.
You do whatever it takes, that seemed to work for us. I mean, at one point, we were washing more cars per day than any other company on the planet, as I was adding up the numbers once and I was blown away. Consider crews in 23 states, serving some 450 cities? Lots of cars, my God. I can tell you that we could never have achieved anything that wasn’t because of our production strategies, so I’d like you to consider all of this.
