I used to be proud of my retract binders. Laminated sheets, organized by make and model, updated every time a new vehicle gave us trouble.
Every new hire got trained on them. Which cars to pull back the wraps. Which ones to retract the top brushes. Which ones got the full retract.
Those binders were gospel, and for a long time, they worked. But the road doesn’t look like it did 10 years ago, and the binder can’t keep up.
“If all cars were Ford Tauruses, this would be easy.” That used to be my running joke. I thought it was funny because when the Ford Taurus was the best-selling car in America, it was true. But nobody’s washing a fleet of identical sedans anymore.
Oversized trucks, roof racks, aftermarket accessories, lifted suspensions, low-profile tires. The variety rolling through a tunnel on any given Saturday makes the old, laminated sheet approach almost impossible to maintain. The cars evolved. The question is whether your wash process did too.
Retract All?
“Retract all” became the go-to safety net. When a loader couldn’t identify the vehicle or didn’t want to risk a claim, they pulled everything back.
Wraps retracted. Top brushes retracted. Side brushes barely made contact. It felt safe, and from a damage standpoint, it was. But a wash where nothing touches the car isn’t a wash. It’s a rinse with a receipt.
I took my truck through a wash not long ago and paid $35 for an exterior that barely touched it. I had a roll bar. The wraps skimmed the sides. The top brushes never made contact. Everything was pulled back.
Nobody said a word to me before the wash, during the wash, or after. I drove in, I paid, I drove out. And I noticed. Not as a criticism to this owner, but because it can happen to any owner out there.
What stuck with me wasn’t the wash itself. It was the silence. If someone had walked up and said, “Hey, your truck’s tough to wash properly with that rack, just so you know,” I would have respected that. That’s a conversation. That’s honest. Instead, the transaction just happened.
As a customer, I didn’t leave angry. I left indifferent. And indifferent customers don’t come back. They don’t join club plans.
The Modern Approach
Today’s wash equipment can read each vehicle and adapt on its own. Sonar profiles the vehicle’s height as it enters the tunnel. Photo-eyes detect the beginning and end of the vehicle, giving the system a precise window to work within.
When brushes or wraps encounter oversized components like high hoods, brush guards, or aftermarket accessories, friction spikes. On electric-driven equipment, variable frequency drives read out-of-range amps and respond. On hydraulic equipment, electronic pressure gauges detect the anomaly and communicate it to the latest generation of motor control centers, which act in real time.
Abdicate wash quality to the equipment. The technology has earned that trust through unmatched consistency.
The wash doesn’t need a laminated sheet to know what’s rolling through. It senses, communicates, and adjusts, delivering contact to every painted surface without a retract button in sight.
My Dodge TRX is the hardest test I can throw at a tunnel. The oversized roll bar alone would have triggered a full retract five years ago. Add oversized tires, a high hood, and an aggressive profile, and you’ve got a vehicle that would have sent a loader straight to the binder.
I’ve watched it go through my son’s wash and come out with every painted surface clean. When the wraps hit that roll bar, friction spiked, the VFDs and pressure gauges caught it, the motor control center adjusted, and the wash kept going. Nobody touched a button. The equipment figured it out.
Trust The Equipment
I used to maintain the retract binders. Now I trust the equipment completely. That’s not a small admission for someone who spent years building those laminated sheets.
The old approach demanded constant attention from staff. A new hire had to memorize vehicle profiles. A distracted loader meant a missed retract or an unnecessary one. The binder only worked when every person on the line executed it perfectly, every car, every time. That’s a lot to ask.
After watching sensor-driven automation deliver the right result car after car without that human bottleneck, I stopped second-guessing. I abdicate wash quality to the equipment. Not because I don’t care, but because the technology has earned that trust through consistency I couldn’t match with a binder and a training manual.
A modern controls platform gives you real-time visibility into wash performance. Exception alerts flag when something falls outside the norm. Remote monitoring lets you confirm quality from anywhere, not just when you happen to be standing in the tunnel.
You can see cycle counts by wash package, track equipment performance trending over time, and catch a developing issue before a customer does. You’re not hoping the equipment got it right. You’re seeing that it did, every cycle, on a screen or a phone. That kind of verification used to require a person watching every car. Now it requires a platform and the willingness to look.
Widening Gap
The quality gap between washes is widening, and most customers will never tell you about it. They just won’t come back.
The washes investing in sensor-driven automation are delivering consistent contact on vehicles that would stump a retract sheet. Their members stay longer because the wash earns the next visit every time. This isn’t about chasing technology for its own sake. It’s about what that customer feels when they look at their car in the parking lot and decide whether to come back next month.
Those laminated binders served their purpose, and I’m grateful for what they taught me. They forced discipline. They forced attention to the vehicle mix. But the equipment has caught up and passed them. The operators who thrive from here are the ones willing to let go of the old safety net and trust what today’s wash intelligence can do. Be that operator.
Good luck and good washing.
Joining the company in 2000, Anthony Analetto serves as the president of Sonny’s CarWash Equipment Division. In this role, Anthony leads the innovation of new products to drive client success and oversees all operations, engineering, and supply chain management. Washing cars for more than 30 years, Anthony was the director of operations for a 74-location national car wash chain prior to joining the company.