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What Happens If You Never Wash Your Car?

What if you never wash your car

What Happens If You Never Wash Your Car?

One of the most irritating things for a car owner is to see their car covered in filth. However, not everyone is crazy about their cars. Moreover, laziness strikes everyone. But have you ever wondered what would happen if you never wash your car?

So, what would happen if you never clean your car again? Well for starters, it would look absolutely horrid. But, other than that, you risk corrosion, scratches, impaired vision, and a possibly reduced resale value. All these problems can lead to heavy financial consequences. The simple solution is to just regularly wash your car. An even easier task would be to drive through a car wash and let the machines do all the work! This way you will be able to save a lot of money down the line in case something happens.

Read on to find out how simple dirt can lead to big problems in the future and what you can do about it.

Degraded aesthetics

As mentioned earlier, the first drawback is that your car will start to look bad. You will not feel like driving it to various places. If you keep it unwashed for long enough, you may not even want to open the door. But that is just the outside. It is equally important to clean the inside of your car too otherwise you might start to smell weird odors. Overall, it is not a car you want to drive anymore thus defeating its purpose.

Impaired vision

Dirty Windscreen
Dirty Windshield | Image Credits: Unsplash

Remember, the dirt can get everywhere on the car. One of these places is the windscreen or the rear window. When these places get dirty, you may not be able to see properly while driving. The same goes for your rearview mirrors too. This is particularly dangerous for the windscreen as it is crucial for safety purposes. Missing a turn symbol is the least of your concerns. The light from incoming traffic might be diffracted and may cause you might lose concentration, or you may not be able to see clearly in foggy weather. Such situations may lead to fatal accidents.

Possibility of rust

When the dirt has been sitting on the exterior of your car, it tends to collect a lot of moisture and retain this. Over time, this moisture can seep through the protective layers and start to corrode the metal inside. While this would take a special kind of negligence, we are exploring what the possibilities are if you never wash your car. While this corrosion is going to be slow acting, it may not structurally affect the car. However, if you already have exposed scratches on the body, the corrosion might be faster and thus affect the car more.

Body scratches

Getting a newly painted body scratched is one of the biggest worries of anyone who loves their car. While it is hard to imagine, leaving your car unwashed for a long time might lead to scratches. The way this works is that the dirt or sand particles that are part of the unwashed car get blown by the wind at high speeds. Since these dirt particles can be sharp, they tend to scratch the car’s surface and deteriorate the paint job. While this is not common, it can happen if you never wash your car.

Lowered resale value

reducing resale value
Reducing Resale Value | Image Credits: Pixabay

Finally, if you look at it strictly from a financial perspective, the consequence of never washing your car is simply that the resale value decreases. This goes for having your car clean both inside and outside. Otherwise, the buyer will claim that they will have to get the car cleaned which will cost additional money. Moreover, it gives an impression to the buyer that you have not done general maintenance of the car further lowering the value of the car. Of course, you can try to avoid this by getting it cleaned before putting it up for sale. But again, this will take a lot of time, money, and effort than just cleaning your car regularly.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, never washing your car does not lead to any functional problems with the car other than the safety associated with the cleanliness of the windscreen. However, they lead to some horrible aesthetics of the car. You may not want to drive your car anymore if it ends up looking that bad. Ultimately, the resale value of your car will also go down. To avoid this, you can simply take out some time every month or so and clean the car yourself. If you are still feeling lazy, just sit and take the car through a car wash. All you have to do is sit and watch a movie on Netflix while the machines do their work.

Hopefully, this article helped you understand the repercussions of not cleaning your car. We wish that it also gives you the motivation to maintain your car with a little more enthusiasm and that the car looks brand spanking new every time you take it for a spin!

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