Do you enjoy car washes? 🚗✨
I usually wash my car at a nearby hand car wash on weekend mornings. It’s quite early, yet there’s always a crowd. Those who wash their cars at that hour are genuinely into it.
Watching them scrub lovingly, just like they would care for themselves, reminds me of an essay from Tanabe Seiko’s collection, ‘Women and Thighs,’ particularly the part about confident women in the bathhouse. If she had observed a car wash instead, she’d have noted the dawn washers as the most confident ones. 🚿💪
Recently, that car wash closed, and I couldn’t wash my car for a while. But this morning, while fueling up, I spotted a sign saying ‘Car Wash In Operation.’ They even offered a discount with fuel, so I tried it out and was totally blown away by this convenient system! 🚙💨
Place the front wheels on the ramp, turn off the engine, and everything proceeds automatically. As the car glides into the tunnel on a conveyor belt, lights flash, rain showers the windshield, followed by a snowy gust. Wind blows, cloths flap against the glass, and voilà—car wash done in under five minutes. Unbelievable!
‘Isn’t this the greatest invention of the 21st century?’ I thought, only to find that this machine has been around for over 50 years! (20th-century marvel!) The first car wash machine, ‘Washing,’ was introduced back in 1962 by a German entrepreneur in Augsburg. It was a semi-automatic machine using two brushes. A new model with a dry brush debuted the following year, and a fully automatic version similar to today’s appeared a year later.
Given its age, you’d expect it to scrub birds’ droppings off the glass and make the car shine brightly. But strangely, it’s remained the same for fifty years, like an analog radio… Yet, there are still people like me, jaw-dropped by today’s auto wash, so maybe there’s no need for further advances. There are countless areas in the world that need innovation, after all. I get it, though.
‘The auto wash is fine as it is, but please make the store kiosks easier to use.’
That’s what I want to say. I had to order via a kiosk at a cafe near work today, and I struggled to find where to insert the card. The receipt slot, barcode scanner, and card slot all looked alike, and the card sneakily slipped into the receipt slot, causing me quite the hassle to retrieve it. Speaking of which, why scrub the wheels with a metal brush for over 30 minutes? 🤔 They’ll just get dirty again on the way home…
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