If you live in a place where roads are salted, washing your car is generally recommended to reduce rusting and paint damage. I don't go to the car wash often and I only use the one at my local gas station, but it's rare that I go there and there aren't already at least two cars in line. And I live in a very low population density area.

At 1 car every 14 minutes on average, a single bay will easily clear $1,000/day of revenue.

If any of the fancy new car washes in my town were only clearing $1k/day, they'd be folding shop pretty quickly. I don't know where you live, but the wash by me (JetSplash) does between 500-1000 cars a day at over $20 a pop. So you're off by a magnitude or more.

Yeah, not around here though. My estimate is based on how long a wash takes and allowing for people not washing as frequently at night at the wash attached to my local gas station. This is a rural area.

However my neighbor used to own a chain of car washes in the suburbs and going by his 11,000 sq-ft house, I'm guessing it was pretty profitable!

1000 cars in 12 hours is 42 seconds each. Does JetSplash really move them through a single stall that fast? The wash I go to in the spring (salt removal) takes about 600 seconds. Just asking since that makes it more like a factor of 2 than 10.

I'm guessing OP was referring to the average over multiple stalls.

I don't know the gear JetSplash uses, but the link below looks roughly the same as what I've seen them use. They claim 400-800 car per day.

I've seen other sites state up to 120 cars per hour. Assuming 750/day @ $20 wash, that's an annual gross of about $5.5M. I doubt they're running at that rate consistently, just at peak. But I would be surprised if $2M wasn't the average in town. That's pretty good for a low labor enterprise.

https://www.broadwayequipment.com/conveyor-car-wash/

My local car was has a $20/month subscription for unlimited washes. These aren't exactly luxury services--they're priced similar to a Netflix plan. If you have a car, it's worth it if you value our time at all.

But if you value your time, why would you wash your car multiple times per month?

That's perfect. I do not wash my car, because I value my time. I thought I was just lazy!

It is so simple to come up with excuses. It is raining. No need to go. We are in spring and here it means the dirty season, no need to go. Or it is negative temperature outside, it probably does not dry...

salt on the roads destroys cars. If my car can last a year longer before falling apart that is a lot of monea saved for me. I drive my cars to the end most of the time. Plus a clean car makes my wife happa which is itself important.

It takes roughly five minutes depending on how long the queue is, so when I'm out running errands I'll stop in. Keeps the road crud (and most importantly, salt) off the car so it lasts longer.

Only if you insist on a spotless car… we haven't actually cleaned ours in years to basically no detriment, and we're im the Central Valley. I'm inclined to agree with gp.

In the time it takes to drive to one, wait and drive back, you've already spent the same time as washing yourself at home.