Even in the Winter; Keep Your Car Clean

Most people view the summertime as car washing season.  And for good reason, it’s often too cold to turn the hoses on at home without risking freezing up your pipes!  While it’s easier to wash your vehicle in the summer, and it is important to keep a clean vehicle, it is also important to clean your vehicle regularly in the winter.  In fact, getting the road junk off your car is how you make sure not to cause body damage.

Wondering why you need to detail your vehicle in the winter?  How does the winter weather affect your car here in Billings, MT?  Big Sky Collision Center is dedicated to making sure you have a safe and comfortable vehicle to drive.  A big part of that is making sure it’s maintained properly.

 

Why Wash Your Vehicle in the Winter?

Around the country roads are maintained differently.  For instance, if you head to the Pacific Northwest, you will hardly ever see a plow truck, and likely you will never experience sanded streets.  There simply isn’t a need.  Head over to the Midwest, and you will see plow trucks all over, and those trucks dump sand and salt onto the streets.  The result is that you have intersections that aren’t slick, but that salt can do serious damage as it causes the vehicles body to rust.

Here in Billings the streets aren’t salted the same way they are throughout much of the middle to eastern half of the country.  But that doesn’t mean there is no salt in the gravel that is put down onto our roads.

If the sanding trucks were to simply be filled with sand, a tiny little bit of moisture in the air would cause the sand to freeze into a solid clump.  To prevent this, a small amount of salt is added to the mixture, and it allows the sand to “flow” easily from the truck.  Even that small bit of salt can end up causing serious damage to your vehicle.

This winter we have seen a number of water main breaks on our roads.  These breaks cause a mess, and that water will end up freezing if not properly removed.  The ensuing ice can cause more damage, so the city increases the salt content when taking care of those breaks.  This salt can end up causing yet more damage to your vehicle.

The good news is that you can remove the salt.

 

Detail Your Vehicle in the Winter

Here at Big Sky Collision Center, we recommend detailing your vehicle every month.  Of course many people don’t have the time for that, and many more don’t have the finances to do so.  So instead, we recommend a full auto detail every six months; once in the spring and once in the fall.

Throughout the rest of the year, you should be maintaining your vehicle with washes and vacuuming.  You can do this at home when the weather is warm enough (we get a few days that go above 40 in our Billings winters), or use one of the many drive-through car washes available.  While an automatic wash isn’t going to clean your vehicle to the precision that a full detail will, it is still enough to rinse the salt off the body of your car and prevent rust from occurring.

Big Sky Collision Center Details Vehicles

We don’t just fix cars, we detail them as well!  We have a detailing center right here at our facility that is used every day with the vehicles that we repair.  Because we are already detailing vehicles, we wanted to offer this service to the Billings public at rates most others don’t.  That means you get your car expertly cleaned, at a rate that is about half of what you would expect to pay.  You can check out a full breakdown of the services over on our Facebook page.

Ready to make sure your vehicle lasts for years to come?  Call us at 406-259-6328 to schedule an appointment for a clean car.