All three cars get a hand wash and vacuum on a biweekly basis. Two bucket wash method with microfiber wash mitts and drying towels to prevent any swirls. Then I have them sealed/waxed every few months, and have the paint clayed and corrected once per year.
The M has not seen an automatic car wash yet, and because of this the paint still looks far better than most new cars on the dealer lots.
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Every six [del]months[/del] years, whether I need it or not.
(Bolding mine)
I’d never heard of “claying” before. It looks like you’re washing your car with Silly Putty.
Another vote for leaving it out in the rain every once in a while (it’s normally kept in the garage). Once in a great while, less than once a year on average, I might spray it down with a hose. My father was a professional metal worker in his youth and a chemist later on and was a serious car guy his whole life. He always said that soap and detergent hastened metal corrosion if you don’t rinse away every last bit and that it’s just about impossible to rinse away every last bit. Nowadays maybe they have detergents that don’t cause problems. If they do, I don’t want to know about it. It would only serve to make me feel guilty, since there is no way I’m going to start washing my car.
I am usually this way 
You wash your car and you think that you have got it clean. It isn’t clean yet. You take the clay bar, a synthetic material half way between real clay and Silly Putty, and you lubricate the paint with some auto detailing spray and rub the bar across it.
The clay bar is usually white or yellow and you can see it pick up all the little specks of things that are still stuck into the clear coat even after you have washed the car. The particles will stick to the clay and then after a while you fold the clay over and get a new, clean surface and continue. A clay bar treated fender will feel very smooth compared to the clean but un-clayed fender next to it. Smooooth.
Bird crap, bug splatter, small sand, oxidation and road debris, things are stuck into the surface of your clear coat that washing will never remove. Then you just wax a very clean and smooth car again. I do it one door/car panel at a time and it takes damn near all day.
This is how you get that glassy look that you see in magazine pictures.
Probably includes a hand job.
Don’t recall when I last (ever?) washed my 2010 car. Vacuumed it the other day for the first time in a year or so. Was pretty filthy.
When I used to have a car I gave a damn about (62 Vair), I enjoyed washing and vacuuming it. This thing is just an appliance.
Yeah, happy when it rains while it is parked out of the garage…
Those of you who don’t pay much attention to cleaning your car, I assume you don’t share your car with a spouse ?
I find that the main reason I clean the car out often, is that I don’t want to drive around looking at the mess my husband may have left, and vice versa.
If I were the only person using our car, I’d probably be less clean about it as well.
I usually go through the $6 automatic carwash when it needs it. It looks good from 10 feet away but the carwash doesn’t really get all the road film off the paint.
I try to hand-wash it twice a year, in the spring and fall. I fill a bucket with water and car wash soap (right now I use the Turtle Wax kind that has wax, whatever good that does) and spray the car down. Then I clean use a wash-mitt and textured sponge (for the dirtier grille/front bumper/lower sections) to clean and rinse one section at a time in this order:
-Roof and windows
-Hood and front of car
-Sides of car
-Trunk and back of car
-Tires and wheels with textured sponge
And finally I use a soaked and wrung-out chamois cloth to dry the whole thing.
When I feel ambitious enough, I use a bucket and a sponge mop from Dollar Tree (the head is all plastic). I hose the car down, swab it with soapy water using the mop from bottom to top and rinse. Soaping up from bottom to top prevents runoff from hiding places one might miss with the mop. Generally, I do a side, then the back, the next side, then the front, and the top last. How much water I use is of no consequence since it’s from my own well.