Washing your car and caravan without water?

Call me old fashioned, but when you clean your car or caravan the tradition is you use water, special shampoos and polishes to get your car gleaming.

Word by Will Hawkins

When someone suggested I used a waterless car cleaning system, I thought they were joking. It’s like scones without clotted cream and jam, or beans without toast. It’s just not possible.

But, that is exactly what Smart Polish Pro does. You clean your car without using water. Yeah, right.

Heat treatment

To put it to the test, I picked a hot, sunny day in June to wash my car with Smart Polish Pro. And, to add to my scepticism, a bottle of the green liquid costs and the microfibre cloths you use to clean your car around £16.

My financial brain knows I can take my car to the local ‘hand car wash’ and have it cleaned on the outside for £5, and to a pretty high standard. Therefore, the Smart Polish Pro was going to need to last a lot longer than one wash per bottle. The waterless car wash polish was going to need to last, at least, three washes. And, that’s not taking into account the time to drive to local car wash and the wait while your car gets the treatment.

Above: Before

My car, a Peugeot 308 SW (great tow cars, up to a certain weight), was not filthy dirty. But, it was covered in bird poo, in parts, the blood and guts of several thousand bugs, and the dirt thrown up while driving through several rain showers on Britain’s fine roads. All the filth was now baked onto the hot surface of my car.

One on, one off

You need two microfibre cloths to clean your car (or caravan) with Smart Polish Pro. One cloth to do the cleaning, once you’ve sprayed on the magic potion. And, another to polish it off.

Firstly, I sprayed on the Smart Polish Pro to the front offside wheel arch panel (The metal was hot in the sun, remember). I thought the liquid would dry solid in seconds. But, it didn’t. I took the first microfibre cloth and wiped down the panel. To my surprise, the dirt just lifted off with a minimal amount of effort.

Next, I polished the panel with the second cloth, and it came up in a sparkling shine, again with little effort.

My preconception of a waterless car cleaning system was shattered! It does work and there was not a drop of water in sight, let alone a high pressure jet washing device. I moved on to the next panel and gave it the same treatment, and I got the same results.

The ultimate car wash test

The big test, however, was to be the bonnet of my car. That’s where the bugs had suffered the most, and where the birds appear to have targeted with their bombing raids. Again, the Smart Polish Pro took it all off with surprising ease.

To be fair, however, it did not take it all off, and I had to follow up with some ‘spot cleaning’ to get rid of the bugs, which seemed to have some sort of ‘buggy super glue’ in their bodies. Eventually, the Smart Polish Pro (and my ‘elbow grease’) won the battle.

It took me about an hour to ‘waterless-wash’ my car, about the same time it takes me to wash my car using that old-school water method (excluding setting up the jet wash, finding the bucket, the chamois, the car shampoo etc).

How much did I use?

I used less than a quarter of the bottle to clean the whole car. That means that, with a rough calculation, a bottle of Smart Polish Pro is equal to five, maybe six, trips to the local hand car wash. Given it is £5 a go at the car wash, that would be £25 to £30. Therefore, a bottle of Smart Polish Pro is possibly going to save you between £10 and £15 on five or six car washes.

Is Smart Polish Pro worth it?

Above: After - the first panel after using Smart Polish Pro (not used on the wheels by then!)

Smart Polish Pro is brilliant. It’ll save you money, and save you using up a few buckets of water too. You can use it on your wheels and windows too, and it has the same effect. You do get a little streakiness on the surface. But, that’s no different from traditional car polishes.

I’ve not tried it on a muddy car or caravan, and I expect you’d need to wash off the worst dirt with a hose.

Smart Polish Pro is an amazing product which simplifies cleaning the outside of your car and caravan. By using no water to clean, you can wash your car anywhere, and you don’t need any special equipment to do it, apart from two microfibre cloths, which are as cheap as chips anyway.

www.smartpolishpro.com