What to do when your car doesn’t come out clean

At Tommy’s Express, we always want to make sure that you have the best experience possible when you visit one of our washes and leave with the cleanest car possible. But depending on your vehicle and what sort of stains and soils get onto it, we also know that there are times where one trip through our car wash just won’t get the job done.

And when this happens, we do have a solution: Just pull back around to the cashier lane (not the App lane please), let our team member know what happened, and we’ll send you back through the wash on us!

Dirt happens

If you’ve ever tried to scrub off sap, bug smear, brake dust, or road tar by hand you know that there are some vehicle stains that are tough to get off no matter how you try to deal with them. And the problem only gets worse when these stains and soils are allowed to bake on under the hot sun.

You could take more extreme measures, like using rough sponges or more powerful cleaners, but you risk permanently damaging your paintwork. You could ignore the stains, but salt, bug smear, and pollen are all mildly corrosive and can mark up your paint or trigger rusting if left alone for too long. Plus, who wants to drive a dirty car all the time?

When one trip doesn’t cut it

A lot of the time when our system can’t fully clean a car, a second pass is enough to loosen up the stains and better cleanse the surface. And repeat washing helps too, as our Ceramic Body Wax® and Tommy Guard® applications build up over time to provide a lustrous, protective, repellent layer that makes future cleanings easier.

A legacy of innovation

Did you know that the first family-owned car wash that would one day lead to Tommy’s Express was opened fifty years ago? That’s fifty years of car wash experts carefully studying cars as they pass through washes, learning what works, learning what doesn’t, and engineering new solutions to produce cleaner and cleaner cars faster and more safely.

Today our fully modernized process means that the Tommy’s Express car wash system is designed for amazing cleaning power, with presoak applications, waves of body soap, high-pressure spray, and soft cloth and foam brushes that won’t pick up dirt or damage your vehicle. And if some days, for some customers, it takes two trips to get to a good result, that’s no problem for us!