Frequently Asked Questions
If you look at your dirty car, and it looks filthy, but it's kind of smeary, smooth dirty, then you probably want to go to the Soft-touch wash. The rain, the oil kicked up from the road, and the pollen all combine to form a kind of shield, and breaking through that shield takes a lot of chemicals. The best way to get that car sparkling again without all the chemicals is with the soft-touch side. It doesn't take much contact, but it does need some kind of friction to break through that oily barrier. So, even you are a big fan of the touchless, some times you just have to make contact with the car if you want to get it clean.
Aside from that fear of damaging the clear-coat, there are a couple indicators that suggest heading over to the touch-free wash. The first is dirt clods. Those four-wheeling, mud-sliding, having-too-much-fun clods that will build up behind wheels or under running boards. While the soft-touch brushes will shed the dirt, that doesn't mean they aren't going to toss it around some, and there are often small rock chips that I just want rinsed off, not brushed back into my finish. Another is road dust. Those caliche driveways will leave my car almost completely white during the summer, and that type of road dust comes off perfectly on the touch-free side, again without worrying about scratching my finish.
When in doubt, we recommend the soft-touch side. If you are washing your car regularly (and you should be), you can alternate between bays to reduce concerns about wear and tear on your clear coat finish.
That would be one of the owners, Greg. He has spent way too long in the music industry in one form or another (playing various brass instruments, singing, recording, directing, etc), and if that wasn't bad enough, now his oldest son has set his sights on being an opera singer. Note that we never said he made a decent living with any of that, so we're not entirely sure where his son got the idea that he could. Still, it remains a strong focus, and there is plenty of empirical evidence that music enhances all aspects of life, even a car wash.
We measure the water at the wash. A lot. Put simply, better water means a better wash, and it also means the wash equipment will stay better longer. So, every wash in town processes the city water to make better water with big industrial water softeners. They're just like the ones at your house, only about ten times bigger. But removing the hardness is still not enough to be considered "Spot Free". No matter how good the driers are, there will always be water evaporating off the car - especially in a hot Texas summer! When that water evaporates, anything that was in the water gets left behind as a gray film or spots. That's not hardness, but another measure called "TDS", or Total Dissolved Solids. The water coming out of your tap will have a TDS any where from 150 up to 600 in central Texas. For a car wash's spot free cycle, we want water with a TDS of less than 50. In fact, at Taylor Choice Wash, we keep our TDS below 10, usually around 6 or 7. We much prefer this approach to what other washes may do, which is to spray even more chemicals on the car (usually a silicone based spray) to keep the solids from sticking to your finish.