Q: What is the difference between a carwash and a detail?
A: Car detailing is safe for your car, and car washes are not.
Car detailing can involve paint correction.
Car detailing involves some sort of paint protection.
Friction car washes scratch cars and destroys paint.
Car washes are not as thorough as car detailing.
Car washes do not clean the car’s interior.
Car washes are much faster.
Car detailing needs to be performed less often than washing.
Car detailing is crucial for cars to retain value.
Q: What is paint correction? Why do I need it?
A: The most basic way to put it is that paint correction is essentially polishing the paint. It’s a procedure that involves using a polisher and multiple grades of polish and cutting compounds in stages to remove minor imperfections on the paint’s surface.
Every time you run a duster or microfiber over the paint, install a car cover, or lightly brush up against the surface of your car, dust, dirt, and debris bite into the paint. Although you might not always see them, microscopic scratches are left behind.
As these tiny scratches pile up throughout the years, they’ll start to stand out. Paint correction is great for dealing with them, as it removes a very small layer of the paint or clear coat, just to bring it to level with the deepest parts of the scratches. If the right products are used, paint correction can also help with some oxidation, but that’s another discussion entirely.
While paint correction is a more aggressive tactic than simply giving a light polish or waxing the surface of your car, it can only do so much. It’s not going to fix orange peel, it won’t remove any deep scratches in the clear coat, and it certainly won’t repair scratches that go all the way to the metal. It’s simply the process of cleaning up the outermost layers of paint so that minor imperfections don’t take away from the luster.