Knowing when to wash your vehicle is pretty cut and dried — the car’s dirty, you wash it. How and when you wash it is, of course, entirely up to you and depends on how picky you want to be and how much time you have to spend on it. What about the underside of your vehicle? It’s easy to forget about, because out of sight out of mind, but washing the underside of your car or truck is every bit as important as washing the windows and sheet metal.
Why is it so important, you ask? Surely it doesn’t matter that much since people don’t see it. You’re not going to impress girls with a clean undercarriage, right? Listen, you don’t clean the bottom of your car for other people, you do it for the car. The chassis, floor pans, subframe assemblies, suspension bits, exhaust, and other mechanical bits and bobs under the car are the closest thing to the road. They are exposed 24/7 directly to all the grime, dirt, grease, dust, mud, and debris that covers every road you drive on. Add to that any fluid leaks or spills and you get an ungodly mess down there.
What if you don’t care to wash the underside of your vehicle, though? What’s the worst that can happen?
How bad could it be, really?
I’m going to answer that question with another question — How much do you like rust? See, neglecting your vehicle’s undercarriage can lead to some pretty nasty rust-related issues. That’s especially true if you live somewhere where the local road department salts the roads in the wintertime. Rust and corrosion can happen in the cleanest, driest environments, but layers of gunk and road salt can really speed that process up. In addition, dirt and debris can get packed into crevices in the chassis and body that can capture moisture and rot a vehicle from the inside out. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever lived on a dirt road.
An exceptionally rusty undercarriage can be a real pain, and can lead to expensive repairs or even to dangerous mechanical failures. Rust eats away at steering and suspension components, chews through subframes, and dissolves floors and wheel wells with equal ease. It seizes nuts to bolts and bolts into captive holes and various parts to one another that often need to be destroyed to be removed or separated. It can destroy a spring, ruin an exhaust system, and generally cause havoc if you don’t nip it in the bud. Doing so is as easy as regularly spraying off the underside of your vehicle.
The best way to wash under your vehicle is to run it through a car wash with an underbody wash option. Sure it’s a little more expensive, but it’s better to throw a couple bucks at that than, say, all new steering components or heavy body work.
