We occasionally provide excerpts from The Great American Car Wash Story. Former ICA Executive Director Gus Trantham and veteran commercial writer John Beck wrote this book in 1994. It represents the most complete history we have found of the industry inNorth America. Enjoy.
Could it be true that car washes were dangerous medicine for cars, new or old? Were car manufacturers dealing with the facts when they advised owners to stay away from car washes? Could brushes really scratch cars and were cloth systems safer? Were homeowners damaging the finish of their cars when they used the driveway bucket-and-sponge approach? What might be the best water temperatures and dwell times?
Many different questions, and many various answers, without any really scientific means of evaluation. This was the situation when Marshall Paisner was elected president at the ICA convention held at the Meuhlbach Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, in June of 1979.
The conflicts arising out of cloth’s debut upset Marshall, for he was a man who liked honesty, admired dependability and demanded orderly systems. In fact, he liked order to such an extent that by the time he had risen from a single tunnel wash in Boston back in the sixties to a combination of half dozen full service, exterior and self-serve carwashes, he joined them together via IBM and Sperry microcomputer interconnects, so he could monitor the entire system from his office.
Marshall had been earnestly seeking an answer to the cloth/bristle controversy but couldn’t seem to find one. So, when he became president he arranged for a joint meeting with the Hanna, Belanger and Sherman people plus several operators to see what could be done about this cloth advertising which, as he put it: “Was getting really rough and dirty and had to be stopped.”
When this meeting didn’t seem to accomplish much, Marshall started to work on ideas for a way of carrying on some real car wash research. This finally resulted in the proposal that an official Carwash Research Foundation be chartered. This was soon approved, and ICA counsel Marx Borod was assigned the job of turning it into an official reality.
Hugh Peterson, of Preston Carwash in Dallas, Texas, was named president of this new Foundation and without wasting any time he was able to contract out several projects with the University of Texas at Arlington.
As Hugh Peterson explained in an announcement article, it was virtually impossible for any single car wash equipment manufacturer to undertake any in-depth basic research, but “working together collectively and in a cooperative spirit, it is possible for the research once dreamed of to become a reality.”
As Peterson continued, in part:
“The challenges we will face in the 1980s are many. It is vitally important that we improve our image in the eyes of the motoring public in order to meet these challenges.
Through research at a non-profit institution teaching us how to better use the tools of our trade, we will achieve the knowledge to meet those challenges and to conquer them.
“We are not (just) comparing or studying existing products. Our goal is to establish in a non-biased and research atmosphere the relationship of (such things as) water volumes and temperature, water pressures, surfactants, brush and pad materials, brush pressure and penetration, in both conveyorized and self-service operations. The results will be made available to all the industry, and the extent to which the knowledge is used will be up to individual operators and companies.”