Alongside the recent feature that Matt Prior wrote about getting 100mpg out of his Audi A2, there was a video that went on Autocar’s YouTube channel.
It opens with a shot of Matt at a jet wash, cleaning the A2. Scroll down and, reliable as clockwork, there they are: the commenters lambasting him for ruining the Audi’s paintwork by using ‘the brush’. Of course, they’re ignoring the fact that this is a £500 car whose paintwork is already far from pristine.
There’s an expectation that if you love cars, you also love the act of meticulously cleaning them. I must confess that I don’t subscribe to this, partly because car cleaning takes on a different nature if you work for a car magazine and partly because I just don’t care enough about how shiny a car is.
If you’re passionate about ‘detailing’, you would probably be horrified by what goes on during Autocar photoshoots. Most agree that cars generally photograph better when clean, so that’s what we usually aim for, save for exceptions like off-road tests, where the mud is a feature.
But what do you do when you’re shooting a group test on top of a Welsh mountain and the nearest proper car-washing facility is at least 10 slushy, muddy miles away?
We don’t have the budget for mobile valets to follow us around, so we deploy field solutions. We should probably use some fancy detailing spray, but in reality the road testers’ weapons of choice tend to be microfibre cloth and glass cleaner spray.
Mr Muscle is a firm favourite because, unlike many cleaning sprays, it is actually quite powerful, it doesn’t tend to leave streaks or haziness and, most importantly, it’s widely available.
I usually make sure to carry some microfibre cloths in my laptop bag, because cars have been known to get attacked with mineral water and kitchen roll by unsympathetic photographers.
I like to have some respect for the cars loaned to us by the various press offices. But cleaning cars in this way does rather take the romance out of testing, particularly when there’s also a gale blowing and the ambient temperature is 5deg C.
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