The short answer
Most daily-driven cars around Melbourne do well on a detail every 8-12 weeks, with a quick exterior-only refresh in between if you're parking outside. Weekend and low-mileage cars can stretch to every 3-4 months. Work vehicles and tradie utes are the exception — more on that below.
What actually determines the interval
The calendar matters less than what the car's actually exposed to. A few things move the number more than anything else:
Where it sleeps at night
A garaged car loses paint protection slowly — mostly from driving. A car parked on the street or under a tree is fighting UV, bird droppings, sap and dust every single night. That alone can cut a sensible interval in half.
Distance from the coast
Salt air travels further than people expect. Cars anywhere from Brighton down through Sandringham and Beaumaris along the bay corridor pick up airborne salt that attacks unprotected paint and chrome trim noticeably faster than the same car parked at Malvern or Hawthorn.
How the car's actually used
A tradie ute or a car doing regular unsealed-road or worksite trips is dealing with a different level of grime entirely — brake dust, cement dust, mud — and usually needs attention closer to every 4-6 weeks to stop it becoming embedded rather than surface-level.
A realistic schedule
- Daily commuter, garaged overnight — full detail every 10-12 weeks.
- Daily commuter, parked outside — full detail every 8 weeks; this is exactly what our maintenance plan is built around.
- Weekend or low-mileage car — every 3-4 months, with more emphasis on paint protection than volume of cleaning.
- Work vehicle or tradie ute — every 4-6 weeks, usually exterior-focused, with the cab getting a fuller clean less often.
- New car (first 12 months) — a proper detail with paint decontamination in the first few months matters more than usual — this is when protection actually has the best surface to bond to.
Signs your car is overdue
A few things reliably show up before a car "looks dirty": water stops beading and starts sheeting flat across the paint (protection's gone), the paint feels gritty rather than smooth under a light touch, and interior surfaces start looking dull rather than actually dirty. Any of those three means it's time, regardless of what the calendar says.
If you're not sure where your car sits, send a photo and we'll give you a straight answer rather than a generic interval — see Services for what's actually involved in each package.