Sunshine Coast Maintenance Detailing.
How does regular car maintenance detailing work?
Contrary to what some people may say, we believe that your car is an investment, and that you should look after your investments! It’s typically one of the most expensive purchases you will ever make in your lifetime, and serves a very important role. Without your car, transportation would be a lot more difficult.
Unfortunately with the busyness of life, having a family and committing to the many daily responsibilities we each have, finding the time to put aside to keep your car tidy can be difficult, sometimes near-impossible. But despite this, Mother Nature can be unpredictable and can throw all the elements at your vehicle, slowly but surely degrading the quality of your pride and joy if not maintained on a fairly regularly basis. We see this often with many cars, especially on the Sunshine Coast being one of Australia’s hotter climates. More common than not, we see cars with badly faded paint, faded headlights and plastics, paint covered with heavy swirl marks, dull window glass… the list goes on.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be like this with your car! If time is a precious commodity that you don’t have much of, have other commitments or simply cannot be bothered, O’Keefe’s Prestige Detailing provides in-house or mobile cleaning on a maintenance routine of your choice to ensure that your vehicle looks its best all year round, even impressing your in-laws when they come over to visit during the Christmas period.
So, how does it work? The OPD team will first complete an initial detail on your car to have it up to our spec. Then we will consult with you and organise a routine maintenance schedule that best suits your needs and preferences. Each maintenance clean will involve what was involved in the initial detail to keep on top of it for you, occasionally refreshing paint sealant as required. O’Keefe’s Prestige Detailing recommends having your car maintenance-cleaned every 2-3 weeks for optimal results.
What are the main benefits that you can expect from having your car maintained?
You can enjoy a high-gloss, hydrophobic-coated paintwork that stays cleaner for longer. This can be achieved by the increased slickness of the clear coat effectively “rejecting” scratches, dirt, mud and bug splatters, to a certain extent. Of course, having a coating on the car does not guarantee invincibility, but will astronomically help with providing a barrier between your delicate paint and the outside elements.
As well as increased paint durability, you can expect to see beautiful water beading when wet. On top of its highly aesthetic appeal, water beads will roll off the car body much easier, and can accumulate other water droplets on the way down. This is known as water sheeting which can actually assist in drying your car faster. Drying your wet car with more water, as it were. Less water present on your car means less chance of water spotting; a phenomenon where the minerals present in water are left behind long after the water itself has evaporated. These water spots can bury themselves into your paint’s clear coat if left unattended (i.e. not washed off or removed by hand), which can cause unsightly blotches and dullness on the finish.
When it comes to having your car interior clean and maintained, you can enjoy a dust-free environment that looks and smells its absolute best. At O’Keefe’s Prestige Detailing, we like to treat all initial glossy interior trims with a 6-month sealant that dramatically increases shine and slickness, improving your vehicle’s interior aesthetics and helping reject potential scratches caused from general wear and tear. We’ve found this to be particularly important in vehicles where glossy “piano black” trims are present, particularly in newer Mazdas, Mercedes and BMWs. Being black in colour means that it will showcase its damage and scratches much more easily, which can quickly degrade your interior appearance. In a practical example, we’ve been looking after a BMW X3 M Competition for about 2 years at the time of writing. Our first detail included a sealant on the interior carbon fibre and piano black, which we’ve kept up whilst maintaining it. This has greatly preserved its interior gloss and kept it in significantly better condition than other less-maintained BMW X3 interiors we’ve worked on.
BMW X3 M Competition interior, looked after by us on a 3-weekly basis. Why wouldn’t you want your interior looking like this?
Having a dust-free and clean interior is beneficial for a number of reasons. From a perspective of aesthetics, having clean surfaces will automatically improve the look of your interior, increasing contrast and gloss in all the right areas. Think about when your car’s exterior is dirty. Doesn’t it look more dull with all of the dust, salt and mud caked onto it, ruining its appearance. Your interior is no different, and while sometimes overlooked, being in a tidy environment can do wonders. You’re likely to have more respect and appreciation for your possessions when they are in tidy and good order. Your perceived value of what you have will be higher and you’ll be more likely to treat it well, and fix anything that may be broken to upkeep its higher-valued appearance. This in turn will help with your resale value. More on that further below.
As well as looking clean, the health aspect is another important benefit when it comes to having your car maintained. Particularly with your interior, as a place where you sit in every time you drive, cleanliness is crucial. As time goes on without necessary interior upkeep, many people cross a figurative “point of no return”, and their interior condition goes from bad to disaster. You’ve seen those extreme interior makeover videos on Instagram and YouTube. We digress. From a health perspective, imagine having to breathe in that musty air, be surrounded by old food, dead skin cells and have to touch germy door handles, gear shifters and steering wheels every time you have to go somewhere! As they say, prevention is much, much better than the cure.
You don’t have to do any work to enjoy a constantly fresh and clean car that looks better than it did off the showroom floor. Leave that to us! And did we mention, maintaining your car is highly likely to maximise your resale value to make sure that when it comes time to sell and move on, you can get the most money back in your pocket. When you look at maintenance from a resale point of view, the costs that go into looking after your car are practical investments that will help ensure your best return.
How often should I get my car maintained?
Being the car fanatics that we are at heart, we recommend having your car maintained every 2-3 weeks. This allows proper upkeep of your car’s existing paint sealant to ensure that water spots, tree sap and other contaminants don’t get a chance to embed themselves too deeply into your paint’s clear coat. Living in the Sunshine Coast, maintenance detailing every 2-3 weeks is also important for removing the salt off the exterior car. Being based in Coolum Beach and right next to the ocean, it takes barely half a day for a thin film of salt to cake itself onto the car. Frustrating, we know, but it’s a small price to pay for being able to live in such a beautiful area of the Coast! Letting the salt dwell for too long can allow surface rust to form in affected areas, which can begin a downhill spiral of rust. We’ve all seen those kinds of cars before that have been left too long…
We understand that having a maintenance clean every 2-3 weeks is a little out of reach for some, be it due to a busy schedule, budget, and other lifestyle factors. A monthly maintenance clean is a very viable option that can help reduce coast while still allowing you to have a clean car. At the end of the day, it really does depend on how the car is treated in between maintenance cleans, and the type of car that you may have. European cars, for example, are notorious for having soft brake pads, that produce fantastic brake feel and “bite”, but at the cost of a significant amount of brake dust formation, quickly causing brown wheels, calipers and tyres. As well as being an eyesore, this brake dust waste is corrosive and can cause chemical damage if left for too long, which can easily “write off” your wheels and cause pitting; the rough texture that is damaged wheel clear coat. Maintaining your wheels is a guaranteed way to avoid this from ever happening.
A real-life case study on wheels chemical-damaged by brake dust. This Mercedes (read: European car) wheel has gone too long without a clean.
Aftermath. Too much time was spent getting this wheel to this level. Look into the wheel barrel area and you’ll see that all our cleaning efforts barely made a dent in getting that caked-on dust off. Wheel respray up next on the to-do list.