Car or Truck Covered in Road Salt Springs Here Time to Clean It Off

Does your car look like this? I know you don't even wanna think about cleaning your car, but in this video, I'm gonna show you why it's important to get that salt off and how to do it.

Road salt is extremely important in preventing accidents and also melting ice and snow. But on the negative side, it can cause some serious damage to your vehicle. For instance, this car is covered in salt. It's all over. There's tons in the front, it's all over the side of the car, on the roof and on the windows. And what looks like the worst is gonna be on the back of the car. And that's from all the turbulence while you're going down the road. But what can really damage your car is everything underneath.

And one thing we all know about salt, it's gonna cause rust. Anywhere there's bare metal or metal that hasn't been treated or coated or undercoated is gonna rust. So such as these brackets right here, they were never coated, so they start to rust. It's all flaking off. And even other components. The reason why this mount broke for the sway bar bracket, it's due to rust. This must've been scratched at one time and eventually corroded and rusted away. And that's gonna happen to the entire car. Even parts of the body that were coated and painted correctly can sometimes rust through. There was either a scratch or a lot of build up of salt over time and the panel is starting to rust through, and this needs to be corrected before it takes out the whole panel.

Another reason why we wanna get this salt off is you don't wanna touch anything on your car with the salt there. You're gonna end up scratching the paint or while you're getting groceries out, you're gonna end up getting salt on your clothes and on your skin and it can irritate your skin.

So let's get the salt off the car. You also wanna think about the weather days ahead. If it's gonna rain anyway, wait for the rain to rinse most of the salt off and then wash your car after. If it's gonna snow, you're just gonna collect more salt. Do it after that as well. To start, you wanna rinse the car from top to bottom. Rinse off as much salt as possible on the side, in the wheels, in the wheel wells, everyone forgets in the wheel wells. Just go in here, just get as much as possible. And then after that, go underneath the car as much as you can.

Don't wipe away the salt yet. Just rinse it. This is if you don't have a hose. I'm just using a bucket and this towel. Now, rinsing the salt off is better than nothing, but you definitely wanna wash it with soap and water to make sure you get all the salt off. So before the water dries, ensure you get out a bucket of soap water and wash it off. You can start from the top of the vehicle and work your way down and just wash all the surfaces. And you can do a section at a time. You don't have to do the entire car and then rinse it. You can just do this door and this door and then rinse that soap off. And then repeat on the other panels.

You don't wanna forget about the wheels and tires either. Get all the soap off the wheels. It's gonna corrode the aluminum, just as bad. Don't forget to clean inside the doors, any of the door jambs and the area where you can get salt built up right there and on the door. So clean that area. And underneath here, a lot of times, doors rust right under here, and it's because salt is built up under there. So clean those all off.

Near the trunk area, make sure you rinse all the salt out of here. Get that. And under the hood. Make sure near the cowl area up here, you rinse that, and anything near the edges where you're going to get salt. And then drying your car, some people use a squeegee or a Shammy or even a leaf blower. Leaf blower probably works the best because you don't touch the paint at all.

I know not everyone can wash their car every single day in the winter time, but there's some things you can do to your paint, to protect it from the salt. All along your vehicle, you're gonna find that you have these little chips and they're from road debris, rocks come up. And you wanna take care of those. You wanna use some touch-up paint on those. You can clean them up a little bit. You might have to use a little bit of sandpaper or a wire brush. Clean those up. Put a dab of touch-up paint. That's gonna seal it. At least that area isn't going to rust through.

When this area is sealed up, you're gonna prevent salt from getting in there and creating more rust, or areas like this where you're gonna actually have to sand it down and repaint this area. And that brings us back to this area where this could have been prevented if it was taken care of early enough. When you repair something like this, you're gonna have to cut out the metal and replace the metal. It's gonna be a lot of bodywork.

Another thing you can do is waxing your car. It's gonna prevent some salt and debris attaching to your vehicle. I know you like your car. Get that salt off. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring that bell, turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.