New car care

I admit it, I have missed a couple of weeks... I'm afraid that it's that time of the year when it gets dark and miserable, and that makes it hard to take photos, especially when its raining - you can get some stunning shots, but none that really show cars looking their best.

We have been doing quite a lot of new cars over the last few weeks. People buy them and then bring them to us to get them paintsealed. We have also done a few nearly-new cars like the one pictured here. People are either buying cars that are 1-2 years old from a dealer and finding that although they are clean, they look tired, or they are bringing us cars they bought a year or so ago and finding that they have lost that 'new' look rapidly. Essentially the problem is micro scratches making the paint look old and tired... we have had to use our paintwork correction services to recondition several such cars recently after customers have brought them to us and asked us to paintseal them. There is no point sealing a car in this condition as a sealant won't improve it much. Better than letting you car get scratched like this is to avoid it happening in the first place. So read on!

This is the boot lid done for us in a demo of a new product last week. Bottom-Left you can see the state that this Mercedes was in when seen under halogen lighting, in the top-right you can see the how the scratches are massively reduced by buffing the car, in fact they would be completely invisible under anything but the harshest light, while the scratched part of the car was obvious in any light. When a car is covered in micro-scratches as this was, the car looks tired and old.

When people get new cars they don't realize that the paint finishes has changed on vehicles and is now much softer, so if you had these microscratches and swirl marks on your old vehicle, they are going to be worse on your new one if you are essentially treating the car in the same way.

The vast majority of these scratches are caused during washing. The no.1 culprit is automated car washes which are far too harsh for modern paint. There are new 'touchless' washes that are supposed to be okay, but I have yet to see one in our area.

The next best way to scratch your paintwork is using a poor washing technique and the wrong tools. Harsh brushes and sponges can either cause scratches themselves, or trap dirt and grip which then get scraped over your paintwork.

Instead we recommend you wash your car with water and giving it a moment or two to soak, and then agitating the dirt using a soft wash mitt, and possibly a purpose made body brush which is soft enough to be safe. You can learn more about cleaning your car on www.carcareadvice.co.uk

This BMW just had a machine polish to remove scratches before having the Supagard UltraPro package, but sometimes it takes a lot more work to get the paintwork looking like new again.

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