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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey and welcome to the Car Watch.
I mean podcast. I mean pod wash.
This is Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Wash.
No, but you're car neutral.
You're put off the gas. Foot off the brake.
Well, and gas really. Yeah, I guess, I guess.
Yeah, but yeah, brake. See, I'm fired.
That's why you get promoted.
Right. You know, I keep you on.
You're a great guy. You keep morale up with the other employees.
So I kept a lot of jobs that way.
Oh, Batman. Oh, I've lost a lot of jobs because of the opposite.
Because your foot was on the brake?
I purposely kept my foot on the brake.
Question. What? What's your deal?
How do you get your cards clean?
You walk me through that.
It's sure. I guess really we get them cleaned.
We have a guy who details sometimes.
He's really reasonable and good.
Like at your house. Yeah.
Oh, God. That's still never done that.
But well, it can get really pricey.
We just happened upon this guy who was good and very inexpensive comparatively.
I mean, some of those are like four or five hundred dollars a pop.
That's too much money. Yeah.
Yeah. Yes. And so we stumbled upon this guy.
So even though we still use them kind of sparingly, most of the time we'll take them through an automated car wash, a friction type, no less.
And that's what we do. And then we vacuum it ourselves afterward.
Yeah. It's sweaty and we start giggling and laughing and we go get a slushie.
Nice. God, is that is a slushie thing a tradition for real?
No, no, I just made that up.
It seemed like a nice ending.
You get me again, but that one was too normy and believe me.
No, I wasn't trying to get you.
I was just trying to put a pleasant spin on sweaty vacuuming.
Yeah. I got you. Okay. Slushie sounds like a nice ritual.
Think about it. I could go for a slushie right now.
A blue raspberry. That's my favorite.
Yeah, I like a little Coca-Cola and cherry mix.
We're talking the traditional Ices.
Well, that's a frozen Coke, right?
Yeah. Those are good too.
I grew up on those. Yeah.
You remember the straws that had like the cut out at the bottom?
It made it kind of like a little spoon too.
Yeah. Gosh. Good stuff.
How about you? How do you get your car washed?
Or do you not? Because I read that 16% of people don't.
Don't wash their cars at all.
Ever. They don't own a car and never wash it for the entire time they own it.
You know, I see those occasionally and I'm wondering, do you even ever wash your car and maybe not?
Do you even know what people say about you behind your back?
They write, wash me on your car.
Right. That's a pun rules.
I go through the, it's the corporation is called Swiftie.
But I've always called it the Schrifty.
I think because of that old internet cartoon from years and years ago.
So I call it the Schrifty.
So I go through the Schrifty about once a month or so and there you vacuum beforehand.
Even though you're not supposed to, I do like my armor alling and stuff like that.
My sort of lazy detail. Then I drive through the Schrifty.
Usually with Ruby, she loves the car wash.
Now because of the great TV show High Maintenance, I got it from Benson Claire and High Maintenance.
I crank up the song Plantasia that you know.
That served as our opening song to our biosphere tour tour.
So he did that and of course he was getting like super high in slow motion listening to Plantasia.
So Ruby and I aren't doing that part.
But that's the tradition.
She says put on the song.
We put on the song. We go through the Schrifty.
That's how I get my car clean except maybe once a year I will take it and drop it off for like a good non-lazy chuck detail.
I got you. But I never had anyone come to the house man.
That's the dream. One day chucked.
There's a dream. I know.
Emily doesn't do any washing.
She's always just like, can you please take my car to get detailed?
Yeah. I'm with you. And I'll just make that happen.
And yes, that's one way you can clean a car.
You can have a detail. You can go to one of those like open brick bays that have a high pressure washer hose.
I used to do that. Yeah. We're not talking about those.
We're talking about a specific kind of car wash.
Typically the automated car wash where you do what you just described.
You just go through a wild ride and your car gets cleaned as you move through a tunnel and come out the other side.
And there's a bunch of other types.
But there's like a long storied history.
And what I took from this research chuck is that that history is all American.
It really is. Because since the car started being a thing, I believe the first vehicle washer patent was given out in 1901 to scare it handly of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
American. And when the model T came out, you had your first what was known as an automobile laundry.
But these were all in the west coast.
They were like Portland, Oregon for some reason.
San Francisco. They count as America.
Absolutely. But then that thing you sent me was wild.
And I'm literally it's like 53 years old when I learned of that car bowl that people drove around and what were those called.
I think they called it an auto bowl.
An auto bowl. Can you describe that?
It's like a concave. It's almost like a giant bird bath.
There. Multiple cars can drive around in a circle.
And apparently the bottom is purposely ridged in concrete to make the whole ride very bumpy.
And you're driving through water that comes up to the undercarriage of your car.
Old timey car, by the way, this is the 20s.
And while you're doing this, it gets all the mud and muck off of your car from all the unpaid roads.
Yeah, it's like a little splash pad and you just do donuts.
And everyone else is doing donuts and splashing each other.
And it just it looked like a really kind of fun idea.
It did, but then think about that water man and the stuff.
Oh, sure. Getting off of the bottom of their cars.
Yeah, you want to be first in line each day.
For sure. Like for grand opening and then never come back.
Yeah, yeah. Those were super cool though.
Not what we were talking about with the automobile laundry.
Like I said, they start on the west coast, but then if you want to leave the west coast and go to the first automobile laundry, you'd have to go to Detroit where Frank McCormick and JW Hinkle opened up an automobile laundry in 1913, charging $1.50, which is close to 50 bucks for that.
That's why I'm in it. 45 bucks, I saw.
Which is, I mean, this is essentially detailing though is what they were doing.
Like you would bring your car in, you would get out and stand around and a bunch of professionals would clean your car inside and out.
So, I mean, that's pretty good for a detail today, even if they did a half a so-so job.
Yeah. And that was in 1913.
Hey, that's 50. It's sort of clean as well, you know what I'm saying?
Is that the one that's at the corner of Ponds and...
No, that's cactus. Yeah, that's a good one.
I used to go there. Yeah, now that's a detailing place.
Okay. And that's where I would go when we were recording at Ponds City Market.
I think that's one reason I don't detail as much anymore because I could just drop it off there and then walk over to work.
Yeah. And we don't do that anymore because that building has been demolished.
Has it really... No. Ponds City Market?
Okay. I was gonna say, wow, I didn't realize we were propping it up that much.
No, it emotionally is demolished for me.
But over the teen years, there were various patents awarded.
A lot of different apparatus, like maybe a better sprayer or a better hose piping systems.
Like there were a bunch of different patents handed out.
And then finally, in the 1920s, we got our conveyor belt car washes, but still not automated because they had like 40 people, like you would wash the bumper than the next person would wash the back right fender and that kind of thing.
Yeah, but this was... so this is the first gleaming of the automated car wash that we know and love to date.
Cunningham's automobile laundry was debuted in Chicago in 1922.
And like you said, there was a bunch of people and they did an assembly line style because everybody was crazy about the assembly line at the time.
They would hook your car up to a chain and tow it along and as it was passing, people would do whatever they were supposed to do.
Like this guy was in charge of cleaning off the headlights.
This guy picked the nets, the dead gnats off of the canopy of the car.
Everyone had a job and it was actually an improvement from some of the earlier ones where they used the assembly line because there would be people who had to push it from station to station.
So I'm quite sure that the workers were like, we love this tow line thing.
Yeah, absolutely. They don't have to push a car around.
And those cars are heavy.
Who wants to do that? They're not like these light things these days.
Three World War II that was mostly those laundry is after the war that was a guy, well, there were a couple of people really.
1946 was a big year. There's one guy named Thomas Simpson who was credited as creating the first semi automatic system.
It also had a conveyor belt.
You hooked your car to a bumper and it did its thing.
But you still got out of the car and there were still people involved.
That same year in 1946, a guy named Leo Russo.
And I've seen different stories about this guy.
I saw that he had this idea before the war.
But then World War II comes along and they take his steel foundry business.
The government basically says, hey, you got to start making military parts for us.
So he kind of refined his minute man, M-I-N-I-T system during the war and then pivoted and started kind of making this system like he built the actual equipment as a system and said, hey, you can buy this minute man system.
And that's pretty much the standard today.
If you want to open a car wash, there's plenty of companies that manufacture entire car wash systems.
You just need to build the building and then buy their parts and install them.
Yeah. And someone will build your building too.
Right. You don't have to do it yourself.
Yeah. A lot of money. You can get this done.
Yeah. I hope you know how to lay bricks.
The minute man would cost about 270 grand today.
He sold it to people for 16,000.
Right. And so this was a huge breakthrough as far as automatic car washes went.
There were still people involved, true.
But they used the existing technology where you towed a car through a very long tunnel.
But there was also all manner of new apparatus and machines and cool stuff that your car would encounter along the way.
Now there were spinning brushes.
There were jets of soapy water.
They used vacuums that could suck the two pay right off of somebody.
Twenty paces away. There was the overhead dryers that kind of hung down like the ductwork hung down and it looked like you were kind of passing under a giant silver octopus.
Like it was an amazing, like this guy basically said, hmm, let me think of the future and build it.
And then eventually people will build better versions of what I created.
That's essentially what the Minuteman system was.
Yeah. In 1946, which is impressive.
This first client was a guy named Paul Moranian in Detroit.
Once again, it Paul's automatic auto wash.
Again, in 1946, he sold that very first one.
And it was, it's recognized.
Paul's is the first automated car wash.
So much so that it had a life magazine article written about it.
Two-minute car washer, colon.
Spectacular new machine scrubs.
We have 150 autos a day. I just bought the thing said Paul.
I had nothing to do with it.
Yeah. Someone even built the building.
So one of the other things, like we said that there were people still involved, but there was vastly fewer people.
I saw a 40 or 50. You could run into an auto laundry working to clean your car typically.
But with the with the Minuteman system, it was down to as few as eight people.
That's a huge reduction in workforce and therefore costs too.
And that if there's any theme or thread to the history of automated car washes in the United States, it's getting as many humans as humanly possible out of jobs in the carwash industry.
That's essentially what they've been trying to do since day one.
Yeah. I was sort of laughing today ironically at the thought of like somebody in the tunnel where we can watch your car go by and get cleaned by robots on social media complaining about AI technology getting rid of humans and stuff.
And they're like, oh, it took six minutes for my car to get washed by those machines.
But yeah, you're right.
That's, I mean, that was one of the first big examples of automation in America.
If like, let's get people out of here.
Let's design these robotic arms to spray things and scrub things.
And it was a huge hit like huge.
There were 50 car washes in America in 1946 when Paul's opened.
Nine years later, there were 2000 of them and 50 of them were opening per month.
Yeah. Because America was like, we love cars and we have a bunch of money and pent up demand from the war.
So let's go nuts and the car wash industry, Paul's or not Paul's, but a Rousseau's Minuteman system was invented at the perfect moment essentially.
Yeah, absolutely. And then before we break, I think we have to recognize the Anderson family, the Anderson boys, Archie Dean and Elden Anderson and Seattle in 1951 opened up their elephant car wash.
And that was what's sort of looked back on basically as a first fully automated automated.
Automated. I want to do one on the automatic by the way.
Okay. Tell you about that.
Is that the lunch thing?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was a no touch system, meaning things touched your car, but basically people did not.
Right. Things meaning like tools like brushes and stuff.
Yeah, just because we're going to we're going to differentiate between the touchless true touchless systems and the no thingy system.
Right. So finally in the early 50s, we have like the first truly automatic car washes at elephant car washers, which is still around today.
It's one of more iconic signs in the United States.
Totally. So okay, let's take a break and you know, we'll come back.
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Cleanca.com. So I said that, you know, we've been, well, not we, but the car wash industry has been trying to get fewer and fewer people involved like over time.
And they've gotten really good at it because it's entirely possible now that you will go to a car wash, a truly fully automated car wash and there will be one person you run into and that is the human being who is standing at the entrance of the tunnel you're pulling into, waving you one direction or the other to get your front left tire onto the conveyor that's going
to pull your car through that tunnel.
That's, that's essentially could be the only person that you'll run into at a car wash now.
You know, I will say at my shifty, and I don't know if it's a company thing or each, are you just laughing at shifty?
Yeah, I don't know why he keeps getting me, but it does.
It sure does. There are quite a few people that work there still.
Besides the person guiding you in, there's, there's probably six or seven people that, you know, they'll walk around and kind of make sure the vacuums are working right or they'll help you out if you can't figure something out.
Like, it's still, it's still customer friendly.
There's not just one, you know, someone picking their nose saying like, you know, put, put your foot off the brake and put it in neutral.
There's one we go to and that is the only person there.
I'm sure there's other people inside in the AC, but it's, that's the one person working outside at least one of the places we go.
Well, I'm sure that's when you go to open up a franchise, I'm sure the, Mr.
Moneybags or Mrs. Moneybags is like, how many people, what, what's the fewest amount of people I can get away with on the payroll?
Right. And, uh, Schrifti hats off to them because they, they keep the payroll going at least a little bit.
Yeah. And there's another model too.
The one I'm talking about is the fully automatic express exterior model, which was a revolution in car washes.
I was developed by Benny's car wash and Baton Rouge down in Louisiana in the very early 2000s.
2001 is Kubrick would put it.
And they, it just kind of took off from there because again, you need one person, like a bunch of manufacturers started making the machines that you need to do this touch screen technology started to develop a lot more reliably.
Yeah. Like you could basically walk away from your car wash.
I mean, not really, but it took a lot less of your time and effort to run a car wash than it used to.
And they'd already tried this once before in the 60s and 70s.
They tried it with coin operated washes, but they tried to just put those in and walk away.
And that's just not how it works.
So those things got abandoned.
That's not happening with these right now.
They're, they're actually proliferating at a, um, untold speed.
I will also say this, well, I'm really selling Schrifti right here, but they have someone in this part of annoyed me and now I understand it.
They even have someone at the touch screen when you're in your car, like push, touching, offering to touch the buttons for you.
And I'm always like, no, man, I got it.
It's fine. But now I realize that they're, they also mentioned the, uh, the subscription and they're trying to sell subscriptions is what's going on.
Yeah. Because that's where the, the big money is.
Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk about that in a second.
One, we go to, they let you use your hand, but they hold your hand.
They guide you this while you make your selections.
It's a little, uh, they say make a pointy finger, make a pointy finger.
Kind of off putting. Uh, all right.
So should we take someone through the actual car wash?
Yeah. Let's, but get inside, take your foot off the brake, put your car in neutral.
Yeah. And let's not play around because this is a serious business.
That's right. Uh, you put your car in between those rails.
Uh, once they give you the thumbs up, your car is going to be guided in there by something called a correlator.
And those are the perpendicular rollers to the tires that are going to slide that puppy right in there.
And then you, uh, like you said, hopefully your foot is already off the brake in the neutral.
But if not, it should definitely be by this point.
Right. And then you have these other little wheels that, uh, pop up and move your car along down that conveyor.
Yeah, it can also be like a tread that's, you know, tall enough to keep your car from rocking forward or backwards.
Yeah. That's the newer version.
So once the car enters the tunnel, this is where I was like, okay.
And this is fairly old technology.
But from what I could tell, it's still generally how they do it.
There's a beam and infrared beam that's constant until your car breaks it.
And the beam is connected to the computer that's running the whole show.
And it tells the computer just how long the car is.
And then depending on how long the car is, um, the computer will adjust the wash that it gets.
It'll adjust how far back the roller is going for what duration they spin for.
Like, there's a lot of information they get just from the link to the car.
And then that, um, that kind of adjusts the wash that you're going to get.
Never even occurred to me that that's, I just figured everyone got the same watch.
Yeah. Me too. I thought so too.
And then another one that's similar at the exit where you're supposed to break it.
And then if it doesn't go back in the time that the computer calculates it should, it will, it assumes that you've stopped at the exit and it shuts down the conveyor and the whole thing.
And all these teenagers come over and start yelling at you to go.
Put it in drive now. What's wrong with you, man?
While you're going through there, you're going to get that prewash sprayed on there.
It's going to start to loosen everything up a little bit.
Then you go through the, these things have names.
It's called a midter curtain that sort of sickened the C monster fabric strip that, that goes left to right that you drive under is called a midter curtain.
Right. And they, they, I think of a more like grimace than anything.
They remind me of grimace from McDonald's.
Okay. The whole point of it is it basically lays on top of your car and moves around to kind of rub in that solution and also kind of rub off whatever grime it can.
It's almost like so if the solution is like the shampoo that your stylist puts in your hair, the midter curtain is their fingers working it through.
Is there anything better than that when you get your hair cut?
No, not really. That with like a hot towel and all that stuff, it's pretty good.
Right now I know all the kings and queens and royalty head people wash their hair, it's the best.
Sure. Our detail guy does that too.
Right there in our driveway.
Joshy first or you me? Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Take your foot off the brake, close your eyes.
Then you get the foam, usually some sort of deep cleaner and you're going to get all manner of, and you know, they're all a little bit different, but you're going to, your car's going to be getting sprayed down really hard.
You're going to have scrubbies that are going to be slapping the side of your car, plantages, playing you and your daughter are laughing.
Your car gets medium, I'd say low, low high to medium high clean.
Okay. When you get through it, it doesn't, you know, this is the lazy way to do it and it calls like five or six bucks.
So that's why I do it. I'm not fooling myself into thinking that this is a great wash and it doesn't maybe scratch up my car a little bit here and there.
Yeah. It's not supposed to and we'll talk about why in a second, but it's, it's not supposed to, it totally does.
If you get wax, you'll get wax after that rinse and the second miter curtain and then you'll get dried off, they have one now called the laser wash 360, which is amazing.
And in a 10 second pass, it can remove 80% of the water on your car.
Right, but see, that one is totally touchless, right?
The laser wash? Yeah. Yes, but it still has a dryer function.
Yeah, yeah. It was just too good of a stat not to share.
I had to find a place to put it in.
No, I love it. I also love that rain shower at the end.
This article that Dave prepared for us talks about the high pressure jets to remove everything.
Mine does a very heavy rain shower type of thing, which I really enjoy.
Yeah, I love that. And then that dryer that, what do they say they get about 80% off or is that just the laser watch?
Well, the laser wash 360's website boasted that so I'm guessing that's higher than the industry standard.
Yeah, that feels about right because when you come out, it blows some of the water off, but again, I'm not, I don't have the kind of car that I'm precious about, water spots and all that stuff.
I don't get the wax. I don't, you know, I just want to get it pretty clean.
Yeah, and there's plenty of car washes like at an express exterior model, like you're done, go get out of here.
Maybe you can go use the vacuums if you haven't used them beforehand, right?
There are some that there'll be like a team of people whose job it is to wipe down the water spots that the dryers didn't get off.
Yeah. And I was reading on a detailer's website, like that apparently is really bad for your car.
Depending on where you live, those water spots will dry up.
The minerals inside stick around and just basically eat through your paint job and can go into the body of your car to where you're talking about bodywork.
Again, this was a detailer's website, but I did see that that's still considered a problem even with the touchless car wash that there's as long as there's water spots that can stick around, the car wash is conceivably harmful to your car.
Wow. The blood of the, what was the creature in Alien?
I can't think of that. I would zoom no more.
Yeah. Dripping through all those different levels.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot about that.
What a great movie. Was that in Aliens?
Aliens, very first alien has that sort of iconic moment where it's dripping down through all the levels.
Mm-hmm. Don't want the thing to make Brian.
Yeah. So there's one thing I am going to take issue with and I'm basically going to ask you what you think.
The CPH rate, which is cars per hour, is a setting.
It's how fast that conveyor moves your car through the car wash.
And apparently at a car wash, you make money by how many cars you can wash in an hour.
And you want to get that rate just right because if you send people in through fast to squeeze more cars in, it's not going to get washed as much and people may want to go through again or complain.
So you want to strike that perfect balance.
But I just don't you figure that people are going to come and get their car wash no matter what or are there literally people that pull in and they're like, oh, this line's too long and they just leave.
I think the greater risk is somebody who gets their car washed and notices that there's like still grime on like the quarter panels of their car.
And they're like, well, I'm not going back to this place.
I'm going to go to the one that's two doors down.
That's just as convenient for me and see how their washes are.
Like I think there's plenty of people who would do that who'd be like, that's not okay.
And rather than go complain and try to get their five bucks back, they just go to a competitor.
That's how competitive the industry is right now that you have to get it right essentially.
Even though plenty of them don't get it right, ideally you would get this right.
And that calculation of how many cars to send through their per hour is extremely, well, maybe extremely it's not the word.
It's a lot more detailed than you would think because it's not just like, okay, if I put X number of cars through per hour can make X number of dollars and we'll just set it to that.
You have to take into account the quality of your water, like the hardness of your water, the softness of your water, how much of your water you're recycling, the quality of the detergent you're using would make a big difference.
Like all these things that in and of themselves give you a good result or a poor result are all going to factor or they're all changed.
They're variables of this larger cars per hour calculation that you have to make.
And these, these, the machinery gets kind of slow or gunked up or whatever on a daily basis.
So you essentially have to stay on top of this every day at a good car wash from what I was reading.
Yeah. Okay. I guess I'm not explaining myself because here's what I don't get.
What is the benefit of being like, oh, I'm going to set it just a little bit faster.
Like I don't think setting it a little bit faster would, I mean, it might get cars through their quicker, but I don't know if that would get more cars through in a day, unless at the end of the day they're like, we're closed.
All you 10 people go home.
You know what I'm saying?
I don't know. Well, let me ask you this is the answer like volume.
Like if you have cars backed up and yeah, yeah.
Okay. Yeah. I think it's exactly what you're saying.
You're saying if the lines too long, somebody will turn around and go to a different car wash totally, totally.
Like some of those car washes, they'll have lines like out into the parking lot outside or out into the road outside sometimes.
And definitely people will go and either come back later or go to another one.
And at times like that, your car's per hour really matters, but you don't want to juice it up too much because again, all those people that you just got money from might not come back because you didn't do a very good job of cleaning their car.
Okay. That makes a little bit of sense to me, I guess.
And people are probably like, Chuck, why don't you just get it?
Maybe I'm from my own personal experience because at 50, you vacuum first.
So you're already in there and vacuuming and cleaning your car.
Like if the lines long, you're just in that line, you're not like, you can't just leave.
Oh, really? That's terrible.
That sounds illegal. No.
Like once you go in there and get that free, free vacuum, you've committed to the service of getting your car wash.
The one we go to has one of the ones we go to has a free vacuum first.
And it used to be afterward, but then they redid the curbing and all that stuff.
So now it's first. Oh, yeah.
But then it can leave. Yeah.
Totally. Right through.
I bet people do that. I'm sure some people do for sure, but I think also wouldn't you just be like, well, I might as well get a car wash while I'm here too.
I mean, I am here and it's right there.
Exactly. All right. Moving on.
Okay. So before we take a break, let's talk about touchless technology because we were talking about a specific kind of car wash that gives you that exterior express thing that we just walked everybody through.
That is a internal friction automatic car wash checks all those boxes.
This is very important, everybody.
Like you can't go through the rest of your life not knowing this terminology.
There's another kind that says that friction thing.
I don't know about that.
We should go with something that doesn't use brushes that nothing actually contacts your car except water, chemicals, air and well, that's it.
Yeah, I guess that's it.
I can safely say I've never been through one of these and I guess I'm a big dummy because I've never really seen these.
I haven't either. But I watched a video of it and it is one of the big differences.
It's a single bay. So you pull your car in and just it's sitting there.
It's not only can Bayer belt that doesn't have a car behind you and in front of you.
Well, they're in line, of course.
But yeah, I watched this thing and it's nothing such a car to spray in the heck out of it and blow in things and water and chemicals and the whole deal that you described.
I'm sure they have them in Atlanta.
I just don't know where they are.
But in the late 80s, it was a guy named Red Lewis, William Red Lewis.
He owned a car wash, I think more than one.
He was tired of paying people for a damaged mirrors or if they break the antenna or anything that can happen, scratching up your car really bad.
But he thought about the system.
The laser wash 4,000 is the most prominent technology.
Now there's the laser wash 360 that you talked a little bit about.
But it sold a lot. I think he sold about 8,000 of these.
And if you have a super fancy, nice car and you don't want to pay for the detailing every time, then I think a lot of people like that use these.
Yeah. Even in Audi's user manual, it says it is best to use a car wash without revolving bristles if possible.
Essentially use either a hand wash or a touchless car wash.
Which again, that's different than no touch.
Touchless, again, just means there's just water chemicals.
There's nothing physically touching your car.
So yes, it is endorsed. The nicer the car you have, the lighter it is, you're going to use a laser wash or some sort of touchless.
But yeah, I've never seen them before either.
And I don't know where to find one.
But I'm sure they're all over the place too.
I guess because they're so much smaller than the tunnels, the tunnel version, you just drive right past them and don't even notice.
Well, they're not doing their job.
If they don't have one of those spaghetti arm blow up thingies.
Right. And we should say also, yeah, totally.
We should say also though that the reason those brushes are so like hated among car wash officials, not because the brushes themselves are the problem.
They make them with like microfiber today.
Like they're really soft.
Like you would at a slow enough RPM, you probably enjoy like just being having the spin around your naked body, right?
But like rocks, grime, dirt, all that stuff can get stuck to the ends of these things.
Just a little bit, tiny, tiny, tiny, little bit.
And when that thing starts spinning at 100 or 200 rotations per minute, it's going to like tear up the finish on your car.
It certainly can. And so they have to clean brushes constantly all the time every day or a good car wash well.
Or else you're going to have customers complaining that you just scratch the finish on their car.
And so people who are into touchless are like, let's just avoid the whole thing and don't use bristles at all.
Yeah. I do understand mine is not the only perspective and just because I don't get all been out of shape about a scratch or two on my car.
I know that people, there are people that are really, really, really into their cars and don't want anything like that to ever happen to their little baby.
Yes. For sure. Can we take a break?
I think so. All right. We'll be right back in.
Yeah, we'll finish up with more car wash fitness.
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Most of the car wash we've been talking about are the fully automated kind.
You get in, sometimes you stand.
I mean, I stay in my car because that's what kind of car wash.
You will get out those still in your car will just be ghost driven.
And I mentioned those little windows, they started putting windows in where like, hey, some people like to follow kids certainly love to walk along, see their car get washed, people that love their cars like their own children might want to follow along and watch their car get washed.
They brought a certain.
