I googled it and there are numerous hits, so it’s not as uncommon as I originally thought it was. Do any of you have or know someone with this condition?
My neighbor apparently has it. He washes his and his wife’s car at least 3-4 times a week. In the winter, he washes them in his garage. Up until about 2 months ago, it was just the two cars, but I think one of their adult kids is back home living with them, and that car is now in the rotation. He spends at least an hour on each car each time he cleans them, inside and out.
I’ve thought about asking if he truly has this compulsion, that washing his own cars that frequently, will probably begin to dull the finish after a while, and that I would volunteer my two cars to be put in the mix every couple of weeks, to cut down on the finish degrading of his own cars.
I only wash my car once a week, never more. But if I didn’t wash it once a week I would feel that it is too dirty to drive in public.
And twice a year I give it the clay bar treatment. You get a little bar of automotive detailing clay that looks like a small bar of soap. Wash the car and get it as clean as possible. Then, using an automotive detailing spray to lubricate the surface, you rub the clay bar gently on the surface.
You can feel the clay grab and shudder across the surface of the paint a little at first, this it the clay picking up contaminants that are stuck in the surface of the clear coat. You can see little specks of pollen, sap, bird crap, get picked up by the clay.
You do this one body panel at a time and when you are done the paint is soo smooth compared to the washed but un-barred panel next to it that you won’t belive it. And then of course you need to wax the panel again. Takes at least a whole day.
Yes. A fellow that lives on our street is like this, and he’s a cop for the next town over. He has a German Shepherd dog, but it doesn’t seem to be a K-9, just his pet. He always waves when anyone in the neighborhood drives by, but most folks here do that if they are out in their front yard.
My experience with people who wash their vehicles all the time is that those vehicles tend to rust much less and last longer.
Personally, I have not washed a vehicle in 25 years. I let the kids hose the truck down for $2 two times in five years. It was not really a wash as much as fun climbing on the truck and spraying everybody.
Washing in the garage in winter is not a good thing unless the garage is heated. All that moisture hangs in there at the perfect rusting temperature.
My luck has been very good so I’m not changing. The rains will come.
I knew a coworker that was a bit on the clean freak side. He quite possibly had car washing OCD. He had just gotten a brand new and expensive car. Him and some friends decide to do a night out on the town. They leave his car parked at a parking lot near the beach. Right under one of those giant parking lot light poles. Well, apparently, this pole was the favorite night spot for sea gulls. When they arrived back at his car at like 4 am, it looked like gallons of bird crap had been dumped on his car. He spent the next 4 or so hours at a car wash (so I am told).
I wash my car every couple of weeks and get the clay bar treatment once a year or so. When I’m on long trips I like to rinse the road grime off every so often. It’s kind of relaxing to take a half hour off or so and get back on the road with a clean vehicle.
Back when I had my car, I lucked out and had a brushless car wash down the street that did detail work, too. It was a high-volume, popular place, as their prices were really reasonable. Every three months I got my car waxed, armor-all treatment in and out, with vacuuming of carpets and upholstery, windows inside and out, the whole thing dusted and sparking for $35. Totally worth it, and in-between washings were less than $5.
That neighbor guy is crazy. It must be nice to have so much time to waste!
I run it through the gas station car wash about monthly. Every now and then, maybe three times a year at most, I’ll pay the $15 and go to the real car wash and have them do the wheels and tires as well.
That’s pretty much it. Surprisingly, after washing, it’s still shiny (it’s a 2005), and still will bead up rainfall until it gets dirty enough to prevent the water from beading.
My next door neighbor is like that. She washes her car and her son’s car on a regular basis.
She also shovels snow from the driveway as it falls so it’s not limited to car washing.
Oddly enough, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her wash her husband’s car but she must.
My parents neighbor. During the summer he washes his car every single day, that includes wiping down the engine bay. He also mows the lawn 4-5 times per week and then vacuums the sidewalk with a shop vac.
During winter he snow blows or shovels every single day, even when it hasn’t snowed. Which is ungodly annoying when he’s out at 4am doing it. A few months ago my parents had a talk with him about snowblowing and shoveling at 4am and how obnoxious it is and how he needs to wait a few more hours before he starts doing that. His response was that he’s a doctor to which my mom said “Yeah, but you’re a GP, you never leave the house before 8am and you can, ya know, drive over the inch of snow that we got during the night”
This guy really does have some issues. I’ve never met anyone that really doesn’t understand that people don’t always think about him. He tells his staff what to get him for Christmas. Any conversation you have with him centers almost exclusively around him and he’ll get so wrapped up in it that you can literally walk out of the room and come back a minute later and he still talking without realizing you left. One of his old nurses is a friend of mine and told me the same thing without me prompting her (it had happened to me several times before), so I know it wasn’t just in my head.
Him and his wife will sit out in their hot tub till 2 or 3 in the morning talking loudly enough to keep the neighbors awake and when confronted by said neighbors just sort of blow them off. What’s odd, is that you’d think that an upstanding, white collar, upper class family would try to keep it down when the neighbors come to them in the morning and ask them to be quiet. When they claim that they weren’t being that loud and the neighbors can recite the conversation back to them with details about their son going back to jail and other not so pleasant things.
Basically, I don’t think the guys is “OCD” or “narcissistic”, I think he’s OCD or narcissistic (did you see what I did there) and the daily car washing probably stems from there. Of course I really don’t know him that well. Maybe he’s got BPD or none of the above.
I operate two tunnel car washes and have access to unlimited free washes for both of my vehicles and even I don’t wash my cars as often as this guy in the OP does. That’s some serious overkill.
Do your tunnel washes have those under-car sprayers? I’m afraid of those things. It is one of the things that keeps me from even getting my car washed by a machine.
In the land of ice, snow and salt, a good undercarriage wash in the spring is necessary to clean out the road grime. And that’s the one time a year I get a car wash.
