Car Care Advice

There are quite a few side-by-side wax tests out there, but we thought that for this site we would do our own using some of the more common waxes found in Britain, rather than the high end expensive waxes from America.

On our latest shopping expedition for our How to Clean Your Car Guide, we bought 3 very cheap waxes.

We actually bought the first wax on our list by accident! We thought it was a polish because thats what it says on the bottle. Asda Car Polish is actually a “special blend of waxes with silicones and shine enhancers”. It comes in a red bottle of 500ml and cost £1.86, and you won’t be surprised to learn that we bought it in Asda (Walmart).

While we were in Asda we also picked up a bottle of Car Plan Triplewax Original which was the most expensive of our products at £4.24 for a 500ml bottle.

Our third and final wax was bought in the 99p shop. Car Pride’s FST Wax comes in a 180g tin with it’s own applicator sponge. It cost 99p (it would, wouldn’t it!) which is pretty cheap but you do get less. A rough estimate says that £3 would get you about 500ml, but at these prices, who cares?

We applied each of the products to a strip of the bonnet. None of the products came with very expansive instructions - just wash the car, apply with a damp cloth (sponge), allow to dry to a haze and buff off with a lint free cloth. That is really all the instructions you need, although some products will tell you to apply it in a straight lines or circular motions. The instructions on the Triple Wax were not very good as they try to sell you T-Cut at the end of the directions, saying that it will remove scratches and minor blemishes. This is not such a good idea as T-Cut is a polish, so if you were going to use it, do so before applying a wax. (To learn the difference between wax and polish, click here).

All three waxes went on pretty well, I was using a small cellulose sponge to apply the Asda car polish and when I looked at the sponge I noticed it was dirty looking. “Ah-Ha!” I said. Being a professional, I know what this means… it means that this product contains chemicals which clean the paintwork as you work. This is often what is referred to as a ‘cleaner wax’. The product doesn’t feel gritty at all when you rub it between your fingers which is what you would expect of most polishes which usually contain abraisives, but the chemicals in it will remove dirt and some dead and oxidized paint. So it kind of does the job of a polish while you are waxing. The most famous example of a wax like this is AutoGlym’s Super Resin Polish. Asda Car Polish is very very similar, so much so that it suffers from exactly the same problem - it creates loads of dust when you remove it.
However, it did make an amazing difference to the paintwork. I brought out the colour making it look more green, it made it glossy and it added depth.
Car Pride’s FST Wax is very waxy when you apply it. I was half expecting a paste wax when I saw the tin, it is a liquid wax but it is very thick. It was slightly harder to apply than Asda Car Polish but it went of fairly easy. Again, it left the paintwork looking glossy and deep, and it brought out the colour.
Triple Wax lived up to it’s claims “Easy on! Easy off!”, and that’s about all I can say about it for the moment.

Conclusion
Asda Car Polish is fantastic stuff. It is on a par with AutoGlym’s famous Super Resin Polish which is really the benchmark I go by for retail products. They are very similar and I think in the future I will probably do a side-by-side test between them. It’s very hard to give marks on these products, especially when you think of all the products out there, but I’m going to say that this is a very good 70% which is what I’d give Super Resin Polish which is sold at about £8.99, Asda’s jolop is a fair bit cheaper. I would recommend it to anybody but, it is not the perfect product because it does create a lit of dust. You only need to take a quick spin around the block for the dust to disappear but none the less it is a bit annoying.
Car Pride’s FST Wax comes of far more cleanly although it did take a bit more elbow grease. The finish was good, but it was a bit patchy. You can remedy this by applying another coat, but who wants to do that? I may have to revisit this product and maybe try being a bit more generous with the application, but for the time being I’d give it a 55%.

Anybody who knows me would have heard me say that there are very few bad products on the market. But I found one in Triplewax. It made no difference what so ever! Not a bit, not a jot, I looked at it from every angle and you couldn’t tell the area we had waxed had been waxed.
Bear in mind that our test vehicle was not a pristine highly polished supercar, but a rather old Diesel Golf with quite tired and flat paintwork, just about anything we put on it should have made a difference. But CarPlan’s Triplewax made no difference at all. My opinion is that this product is a complete waste of time and I am going to give it 0%. Save your energy and save your money, get something else.

However, I will say that CarPlan do make some pretty good products, so don’t write off the whole company on the poor performance of this wax.

All in all, this was a very useful exercise of us. For the time being Anna is going to be using Asda Car Polish, but the search for the perfect product will go on! So watch this space.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites