Keeping your car clean can be a chore at the best of times, but even more so when you don’t have access to a steady supply of water. To prevent the torture inflicted by a drive-through car wash, more and more waterless wash products have been introduced to clean a car without needing to dig out the hose.
These products range in both abilities and price. On the cheaper side, you’ll get something that’ll pull dirt away but do nothing else, double your money and you’re looking at options that’ll provide ceramic protection that can supposedly offer months of protection.
Turtle Wax offers a range of waterless options and its Hybrid Waterless Wash & Wax sits in the middle of the range. Promising to effectively clean a car before adding a layer of wax to your car, this waterless wash promises a fair amount for your money, and looks mightily tempting. Whether it’s worth it depends on what you need from a waterless wash however.
Verdict: A mixed bag of results from this waterless wash, but it does at least clean effectively.
Score: 3.5/5
Turtle Wax Hybrid Waterless Wash & Wax
Price: RRP £8 | VIEW OFFER
Pros
• Affordable with good cleaning performance
• Leaves a nice shine
Cons
• Protection is poor
• Poor performance on glass
Specs
Volume 750ml
Protection Carnauba wax
Extras Also suitable for cleaning and protecting wheels, glass and plastic
What’s good?
There’s no doubt that this product can shift dirt from a car, leaving behind a nice deep gloss in a car’s paintwork. Like other waterless wash options, the Turtle Wax uses anti-static technology to pull dirt away from the surface of the paintwork, encapsulating it for a quality microfibre towel to wipe it away, all without leaving any nasty scratches in your paintwork.
On this front, the Turtle Wax appears to excel at lifting dirt away without causing deep scratches to form in the paintwork. The spray and subsequent wipe saw no major increase in the number of minor scratches in the car’s paintwork, while shifting all but the most ingrained dirt from the car’s paintwork.
The inclusion of carnauba in the product helps deliver that nice deep gloss to the paintwork, really making it shine. For transforming a grubby looking car into something shiny (from a distance at least), this waterless wash does a really good job, especially considering the price.
What’s okay?
The price point makes it a very tempting option, especially compared to other waterless washes that promise to add a coating of protection. The light misting the nozzle provides is frugal in itself, but you’ll need a lot of sprays to treat a larger panel on a moderately dirty car properly. To clean a car the size of this Volvo took a quarter of the bottle, meaning you’re looking at three to four washes per bottle depending on the size of your car.
The question of whether it’s actually waterless needs to be brought into question too. Turtle Wax may claim in promotional material that there’s no need for water, but on the bottle, it does clearly state that really dirty cars will need hosing down before you can get to work properly, not ideal for a supposed waterless product. On particularly mucky surfaces, risking this product may result in a need to polish the paintwork, the scratch risk is simply too overwhelming.
Any negatives?
The protective qualities are practically non-existent if you do more than a couple of miles of driving. A quick beading test did show some hydrophobicity but nothing you’d see from a ceramic car shampoo. With a couple of miles under its belt, the protective qualities had all but gone, although the paint gloss offered by the carnauba wax did remain, albeit slightly dulled.
The real crux with the Turtle Wax is the water repellency that’s supposedly offered when applied to glass. A good rain repellent will help improve visibility during a rain-soaked car journey, helping water bead straight off the glass keeping everything clear and non-streaky.
A poor rain repellent will cause your wipers to judder and can even leave a thin film on your windscreen that can hamper overall visibility. The Turtle Wax falls into this section. There’s a visible film that makes driving more difficult, and it caused my wiper blades to streak whenever used. It’s probably a better idea to skip applying Wash & Wax and use a simple glass cleaner instead, it’s not as though glass cleaners aren’t waterless.
Other items to consider:
Soft99 Fukupika Spray, RRP £13.31
Meguiar’s Ultimate Waterless Wash & Wax, RRP £20.00
Greased Lightning Showroom Shine 1Ltr Waterless Car Wash, Wax & Polish, RRP £16.99
How this product was tested:
Turtle Wax Hybrid Waterless Wash & Wax was used twice to clean a daily-driven car to test it’s performance. The spray was used on all surfaces mentioned on the bottle, being wiped away using a quality Gtechniq microfibre towel. The car was then driven as normal to test the performance of the protective coating.
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