If car detailing means cool modifications, these have been a thing since before Tom Wolfe wrote Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (or something like that) in 1965.
The first time my car was detailed (vigourously cleaned) after a service was a little more than twenty years ago. It was a noticeably excellent job. But this was also my first car and I would not know it if it had been around longer.
The first time I heard the term was 1983 when my sister got married - my dad got their van detailed to haul everyone to the church in style.
The only time we had it done was when my husband was getting ready to trade in his 'Vette. We paid about $100 to have it done and the dealer said it definitely made a difference on the trade-in value. Yeah, he might have been feeding us a line, but that car looked goooooood!
Isn’t the 1950s kid polishing whitewalls for the neighbor sort of a trope? I guess it’s not “professional” work but paid.
When my ancestor was a kid, in the 40’s, ‘detailing’ was the thing that dealerships did when cars / trucks arrived from the manufacturer. Fix the paint, install the windshield-wipers, mudflaps, wing mirrors, floor mats, details that needed to be done before showroom and delivery.
When I was a kid, it was what was done to second hand cars after trade-in. Fixup the paint, glass, mirrors, etc. The details.
When I was older, it was what you did to your car before taking it in, to get a better trade in valuation. Clean and polish.
Was there a time when people didn’t bother detailing second hand cars, because they were rusted out anyway? Because detailing as cleaning and polishing wouldn’t have been a ‘thing’ before then.
Yeah, early 70s seems about right. I was in So Cal, though.
It was a thing here in SE Wisconsin in the mid-70’s when I started driving, so it’s definitely not a new concept. A lot of guys still had muscle cars from the late 60’s and early 70’s. Paint on cars was different and waxing was important to keep the shine. A lot easier to pay the local detail man to use his polisher than to have your arm fall off. Also, more cars had leather/synthetic leather seats that needed to be conditioned.
I did it in high school, more than 40 years ago.
Not having a driver’s license yet, my clientele had to arrange/be able to drop the car off with me, and then pick it up after I was finished.
[ETA: even in those days, a fair number of detailers were mobile (ie, came to you)]
This was in the days before (electric) dual-action polishers. Man … what a workout.
Yeah, I think services like this date back to probably before my lifetime, probably to the earliest age of car ownership. They just weren’t termed detailing. Detailing was a term I first became aware of in the late 70s, maybe early 80s, and usually in the context of a car dealership. I knew a guy who sold cars back then and he’d refer to the process of prepping a used car for transfer to the buyer “detailing” and his guys would clean it inside and out very rigorously. Later, probably the 1990s, I saw more and more shops and car wash places specifically offer “detailing services.”
I first heard about it in the late 1970s. It was the job of the father of one my first girlfriends. I asked what he did and she used the word but didn’t know how to explain it and I didn’t really understand it.
Me: So, he cleans cars?
She: No, it’s more than that.
Me: So, he customizes them?
She: Not exactly.
And on and on. But her first response was, “He’s a detailer,” or “He details cars.”
If your car is a little older, or you’re a little tired of it and slightly considering the idea of getting a new one, I recommend spending the $100-200 to get it detailed. Seriously, it can really change your impression of your car. (Though it does help to start by cleaning out all the crap from the car first.)
Is it even possible to wash your own car these days? I thought some towns had regulations to prohibit washing a car in your driveway because all the water just goes down the storm drains. How do the mobile detailers handle that? I don’t suppose they have some way of capturing, filtering, and reusing the water.
There’s a mulberry tree over my driveway, and it drops an awful lot of berries on my car for a couple months in the summer. It washes off, but it takes a while. I wish I could spend the extra time to do a decent job cleaning it, but I’m not sure where it would be allowed. The self-serve car wash places have signs that say “no bucket washing”, which means using their equipment and paying for every minute that you do.
No restrictions here, but I don’t like to stress our well unnecessarily. I take a bucket to the self serve and wash there.
The first time I heard of “detailing” was in Back to the Future (1985)—the humbled Biff started a detailing business.
That’s right about the same time I got sticker shock by having my mother’s car detailed for her birthday in southern California. Fifty bucks was a lot of money for a “car wash” in 1973!
It goes back to at least the forties. Men spent a lot of their free time polishing and buffing their cars . It was pride of ownership. New Cars took effort to get.
My dad had a shelf of various cleaners, compounds, waxes etc. His enthusiasm diminished in the 80’s. He was told the new car paints weren’t supposed to be compounded.
Today people are busy and pay others to do the obsessive cleaning and polishing our grandparents did for fun.
I’m fine with a quick wash in my driveway.
One funny anecdote I remember from the OJ trial was that the LA Times reporter was often asked to “translate” certain concepts and phrases to people not from California. The definition of detailing was one of them
That’s a little weird, as given how sunny and dry Southern California is, they’re much less likely to need car washes than the snowbelt, what with the rain, snow, sand and salt that afflict their cars.
Many rich people in LA are obsessed with their fancy cars which definitely do get dirty and dusty.
Washing a car is not the same as detailing - I’ve had to wash cars ever since I bought my first one in 1983 or so what with the rain, snow and salt. I don’t think I even heard of detailing until 1995 or so, when I bought a used car through a coworker and didn’t have one of my own cars detailed until sometime after 2000. When I have my car detailed, the carpet and upholstery are shampooed and somehow ( I’m not really sure how they do it) all the dust that has accumulated in the hardest-to-reach spots on the dashboard, turn signals disappears. They usually put armor all on the tires and so on. It’s been a while, but last time I had it done it cost me about $100 and took a few hours… An exterior wash costs me about $10 and 15 minutes if I get it after 7pm.
I remember going to a car wash many years ago that had an on-site detailing operation, and I wandered past the garage where they were busy detailing a car. I couldn’t believe it—they had removed the front seats in order to clean under them! That’s when it hit me that “detailing” isn’t simply a more thorough wash.