Low pH just means the cleaner is acidic. Acidic cleaners can help dissolve certain kinds of dirt, but they need to be used carefully so they don’t damage paint or coatings.
“Exothermic” means a reaction that makes heat. The host is saying that calling these car washes “exothermic” is probably not the right explanation for how the low-pH/high-pH method works.
This is a two-step wash using an acidic cleaner first, then a basic cleaner right after. The goal is for the two chemicals to work together on the car’s surface before you rinse.
Concept
foams
Here, “foams” means the cleaner is turned into thick suds. That helps it cling to the car so it can work for longer before you rinse.
This is the idea that detailing methods should be driven by chemical behavior—how surfactants, acids, and alkalines react with specific contaminants—rather than by trends or marketing. In practice, it means choosing products based on what’s on the paint (oils vs minerals) and how the chemistry will safely remove it. The host frames this as a guiding philosophy for developing detailing products.
The host is warning that there can be downsides to these cleaning systems. If you use the wrong product, wrong dilution, or wrong technique, you might harm the car’s finish or coating. They’re saying those risks should be talked about more.
“High side of things” means the high-pH part of the cleaner. That part is aimed at oily dirt and road film, while the low-pH part handles mineral spots.
Traffic film is the dirty layer that forms on your car as you drive. It’s made from a mix of stuff like road grime, oil, exhaust particles, and tire dust, and rain can help it stick and spread.
The problem with traffic film is that it sticks really well to the car’s surface. Even if you have a protective coating, the dirt can still cling tightly, so it’s harder to wash off without the right cleaner or scrubbing.
“Ceramic coated” refers to applying a ceramic paint coating that adds chemical and hydrophobic protection to the vehicle’s finish. While it can make some contaminants easier to rinse off, traffic film can still adhere strongly enough to require proper wash chemistry and technique.
Fleet washes are car washes used for businesses that have lots of vehicles. Because those vehicles get very dirty, the cleaning products and systems are usually built to handle tougher grime than a typical car wash.
Truck washing is mentioned as the kind of cleaning this system was designed for. Trucks get more grime, so the method is aimed at tougher dirt than what you’d see on a normal daily driver.
They’re talking about very strong cleaners used to cut through tough dirt. The problem is those strong chemicals can also harm the paint or protective coating, so the truck may need repainting sooner.
They’re describing a compromise: stronger cleaning can get the truck cleaner, but it can also damage the paint. So you have to choose chemistry that cleans well without ruining the finish.
A ceramic coating is a protective layer you put on your car’s paint. It’s meant to make the surface easier to clean and more resistant to damage, but strong chemicals can wear it down over time.
PPF is a clear protective sheet that gets put on your car’s paint. It helps protect the paint from damage, and it can be affected by strong cleaners differently than normal paint.
Some headlights are made from plastic (polycarbonate). Over time they can turn cloudy (oxidize), which makes the headlights less clear and can reduce how well they shine.
An acid is a very strong cleaner with low pH. The concern here is that it can be too aggressive and can harm protective coatings and certain plastics/rubbers over time.
Term
hyped chemical
The host is warning about trendy cleaners that are marketed as great. Even if they clean well, they can still cause long-term damage if they’re too harsh for your car’s finishes.
Some parts of the car are plastic or rubber trim and seals, not paint. Strong cleaners can wear them out faster, so the host is questioning long-term damage.
Rubber seals and trim are vulnerable to chemical exposure and can dry out or degrade when exposed to harsh cleaners repeatedly. The episode specifically asks whether aggressive wash chemistry can “unnecessarily dry out” rubber components over time.
“Neutral soap” is a cleaner that’s neither very acidic nor very basic. The point being made is that, for car grime, neutral cleaners may not work as well as cleaners designed to be more acidic or more alkaline.
Term
pH
pH tells you whether a cleaner is more acidic or more basic. That matters because it affects how well the cleaner can remove different kinds of dirt.
The host is saying the product’s chemistry should drive the cleaning approach. If the cleaner isn’t strong enough on its own, people build a more complicated method to make it work.
High pH means the soap is more “basic,” not acidic. Basic cleaners can be great at cutting through oily dirt. But too much alkalinity can be rough on plastic parts and finishes over time.
“Road grime” is the mixed film that builds up on a car from driving—typically a blend of dust, dirt, soot, oils, and sometimes road salts or minerals. Because it’s not one single substance, the “right” wash chemistry has to balance strong cleaning with safe interaction with trim and coatings. That’s why the host talks about finding a “gray area” between extremes of pH.
“Plastics” here means the car’s non-painted trim pieces. Some of those parts can get dried out or look faded if the soap is too harsh. The goal is to clean the car without damaging those surfaces.
“Super-soaper” is the name for a car wash soap that’s designed to clean well without being too harsh. The host’s point is that it’s not just about making the strongest soap—it’s about finding the right balance. That balance helps clean dirt while protecting plastic trim.
A “SKU” is basically a specific product version a store sells. The host is saying they weren’t trying to create a bunch of different wash products just to have more items to sell. Instead, the focus was on getting the chemistry right.
“Neglected vehicles” refers to cars that haven’t been cleaned regularly, so they accumulate heavier contamination layers. In detailing, that often means mixed grime types (oils, road film, mineral deposits) that require stronger or more targeted chemistry than routine washes. The host argues low/high pH systems make the most sense in these high-contamination scenarios.
They’re saying you shouldn’t necessarily use the strongest cleaning chemicals every time. A “default routine” is your usual, regular wash. The host’s point is that some cleaners are better saved for tougher messes so you don’t overdo it.
LIVE
Been a lot of discussion lately about low pH,
hype kind of car wash methods using these two different
kind of ends of the spectrum to wash a car.
Some are calling it an exothermic wash.
And I think technically what we're talking about
is an acidic alkaline wash system.
And the concept is really simple.
You have a acidic product or a low pH product that foams
and you foam that onto a dry surface,
which I definitely agree with.
And then before you rinse that acidic product off,
you have an alkaline product that you then foam
on top of the acidic product.
And in doing that, both chemistries work together
on the surface.
And honestly, the results can be pretty amazing.
They absolutely do work.
I think the reason for this YouTube video,
this podcast is not to discuss whether this works or not
because they do.
But the reason for this episode is to describe
how they work, why they became popular,
where they kind of originated.
And then I think there's some risk factors
that aren't talked about.
And then again, what I believe innovation
actually looks like in the detailing space.
So I will definitely have my opinion on them.
But definitely my opinion is that these work.
A low pH, high pH system absolutely works.
I just think that there's a bigger conversation
happening here.
A lot of times a method is born out of chemistry,
not the other way around.
And so it gives me an opportunity
to kind of discuss how I develop products.
And so though I agree with this method,
I think there's definitely a place for it.
I think there are some risk factors
that simply just aren't being talked about
or not being talked about enough.
And so whenever a new method becomes popular
in the detailing space, I always ask myself,
why what's going on?
What's behind this?
Where did it come from?
And really where I think this one is coming from
is that we always say, I always say,
hey, try not to touch your car.
The more you touch your car,
the more opportunities you have to scratch your car.
And so people want maximum cleaning ability
with minimum scrubbing.
Obviously that goes back to my whole core,
why I don't love rinseless washes
because they're so labor intensive.
I want the chemistry to do the work.
I want the product to do the work for me.
I don't want to have to bend down,
get my body in all these weird positions.
And so I think a lot of people,
we have kind of the perfect storm of people
wanting to not put so much labor into a car wash
and not touch their car at the same time.
Well, how do we do that?
Well, we found these two chemistries at work.
And so I think people look to other industries
or adjacent industries as well.
And everyone, and I'm totally guilty of this as well,
but every product brand is looking for their differentiator.
They're looking for their angle.
They're looking for what makes their brand different.
And so I think brands look at
how can we create different methods?
We've seen this with everyone.
McGuire's, Turtle Wax, they create different technologies
for their chemistry, insta-bond technology
or insta-clean technology,
or they will create their own technology claim, tri-fine.
We see this all over the place.
And so innovation can sometimes come from a made-up place
because people and brands are trying to differentiate themselves.
And sometimes, at least what I see,
and I think something that we've seen for a long time
or I've noticed for a long time
is the lack of innovation in chemistry
in the detailing space.
In fact, I've talked about it since right before COVID
at SEMA, and it's one of the reasons
why I have a hard time going to SEMA
because there's such a lack of innovation.
There really is.
I don't think that it's innovative
to say that your ceramic coating is, you know,
now can be wet in one hour instead of four.
I don't know.
I'm just, I'm like, yawn, right?
And so brands really struggle with innovation,
so they create their own technology claims
or their technology, just their own technology, right?
To claim that as innovation,
which is where we get a lot of confusion, right?
Because what is tri-fine?
I mean, what is it?
It's not even a real thing, right?
And so anyway, where did this come from or what is this?
So you have two different far ends of the spectrum
kind of colliding in one and it creates a lot of heat.
That's where you get the name exothermic.
It's creating heat on the surface
by mixing these two chemistries and at its core,
you're just combining two different things.
You're combining an acid,
which is designed to remove minerals, water spots,
salt, break dust in organic contamination.
And then we have the alkaline side of things,
the high side of things, oils, grease, traffic film.
And so each chemistry has its strengths.
Each chemistry has its weakness.
And then by combining both of them,
you are attacking a wider range of things.
And that's why the system produces awesome results
because you're attacking multiple things,
not necessarily at once, but kind of at once, right?
And the biggest culprit I think in this
and the biggest culprit that I,
the biggest challenge, the biggest hurdle
that I came up against is traffic film.
So, because traffic film is a mixture of things,
oils, tire residue, exhaust, road grime,
whatever's on the road,
whatever's been leaking from the truck onto the road,
then it rained and then it came up on the surface.
It's a bunch of different contamination, right?
And road film or traffic film really bonds well
to a car's surface, whether it's ceramic coated or not,
or not.
So it's really difficult to break that bond
of traffic film, right?
So this is why this works so well.
You know, you're attacking both at once
and there's less scrubbing.
You're, you know, removing more contamination.
And so for heavily contaminated cars
or vehicles or machinery,
this is a significant advantage, right?
And I think this is where it,
because of where it came from, right?
And where this originated in fleet washes,
truck washing, heavy equipment cleaning, industrial cleaning.
When you're doing a 53 foot box truck, 18 wheeler,
you can't spend four hours washing that.
You can't spend, you know, all day doing that.
So, you know, truck washes and industrial, you know,
even car washers that did this,
I know Adam Patali with Adam's Polishes started out
in fleet washing.
And one of the problems with him, even in his story,
is he was washing these Coca-Cola trucks,
but they were having to get the Coca-Cola trucks repainted.
I think it was something crazy, like once every 18 months,
right?
And so he was brought in to design a system
with better chemistry that didn't strip these cars,
didn't strip these Coca-Cola trucks so quickly.
But what was going on there?
The car washers or the truck washers at that point
were using extreme chemicals to break down
all the grease, oil, debris on those trucks.
The trade off to that was that they were also ruining
the finish on the car, right?
And so I think that's where this low pH, high pH comes from,
and that's what worries me, right?
Is that we might be creating unnecessary damage
to surfaces, especially when we start talking about
the car, your vehicle, we have piano black,
we have plastic trim, we have rubber seals,
we have PPF, we have ceramic coatings,
we have polycarbonate headlights that oxidize,
we have aluminum components, clear coated and raw,
specialty finishes, and different materials
respond differently to this chemical exposure.
So I think a lot of the risk factors that we're talking about
or that we're not talking about are what is the long-term
damage that these harsh chemicals deal with?
Because they really are.
You're dealing with a really harsh acid,
which could be really detrimental to car surfaces.
Then you're dealing with a really hyped chemical,
which could also be equally as damaging to a vehicle.
And then you're talking about combining these.
So the long-term questions that nobody asking
is like, what happens after 18 months of doing this?
What happens to your ceramic coating?
Are you unnecessarily breaking down your ceramic coating?
Are you unnecessarily breaking down
the clear coat on your car?
Are you unnecessarily drying out the rubbers
and plastic trim and seals on your car?
What happens long-term from this?
And how long is long-term, right?
And so I know that most people,
and maybe in opposition right now,
may be saying, hey, I don't do this every car wash,
but how often do you do it?
If you do this once a month, is that still bad for that?
And did the chemistry create the method
or the other way around?
And so this is where my differentiator is for my brand
instead of creating technology terms
that don't mean anything,
instead of trying to confuse people,
instead of trying to do a million different things,
I try to start with the end in mind, right?
So I think the low pH, high pH came
because it's neutral soap struggle to clean, right?
They struggle really bad.
I think a neutral soap is useless, right?
So I am on the bandwagon of using pH in our favor, right?
And so I think for a lot of detailing methods,
they were created because of the limitations
of the chemistry at the time.
So the chemistry came first
and then the method was built around it.
That's why we have these weird ideas of like,
you can't wax your car in the sun, right?
Because the chemistry came first,
the method was built around that.
Hey, this, it reacts really poorly in the sun.
There is a really bad user experience in the sun.
Let's just not use it in the sun, right?
Or the two bucket method, right?
That was largely developed because old soaps, again,
struggle to release contamination, right?
The process compensated for the chemistry, right?
And so again, it's just a very aggressive way
to clean things.
So I think this is why I wanted to do this podcast,
wanted to do this YouTube videos
to explain my philosophy and how it's different.
Instead of a random made up technology claim,
instead of making up technology,
I believe that the method should compensate
for the chemistry.
So I believe the chemistry should simplify the method.
So I don't even start with the chemistry.
I start with the desired outcome.
I ask, what experience am I trying to accomplish here?
What problem am I trying to solve?
What result am I trying to achieve?
And then with Walter, I work backwards, right?
The method came first, the chemistry comes second, right?
We search out and find chemistry to fit our method,
not the other way around, right?
Because I think anyone can make a strong product.
Anyone can make a higher pH soap.
Anyone can make a lower pH soap, right?
But how do we get, find that fine gray area
in between where we're maxing out the liquid,
we're maxing out the chemistry to limit the give and take,
to limit the downside to the positive side, right?
And so I think balancing that,
not taking the far extremes of both,
but how do we get somewhere in the middle
and then kind of balance everything
to remove the maximum amount of road grime
while not drying out your plastics,
not drying everything out, right?
The balance.
And so that's where I developed a super-soaper.
I wasn't trying to build the strongest soap ever.
I wasn't trying to build a complicated process.
I wasn't trying to sell more SKUs
because essentially if you like this low pH hype,
you really need three car wash soaps.
You need the low pH soap, the high pH soap,
and your pH neutral soap.
Three different car wash soaps to clean your car.
That's a complicated process, right?
I was trying to solve a very specific problem
with the super-soaper, right?
I wanted incredible cleaning ability.
Number one, again, it came from what my own words
that I was telling people of like,
every time you touch your car,
you're gonna scratch it, touch your car less.
And people going, well, how do I touch it less, right?
It's like, crap, I need to give people a solution for that.
But I also want excellent lubrication
because I want to be able to use the soap as a clay lube.
I was doing that all the time of like,
I'd find myself refoaming a car
because it was faster to clay a car with foam on it
than it was to wash the trim
to not get dried out over time after using it.
I wanted a maintenance soap.
So something you could use that could handle
heavy-duty cleaning, and then I wanted something
that you could use as a maintenance soap.
So you only need one soap, not three.
You don't need a complicated system,
you just need one highly jam-packed soap, right?
So the goal wasn't maximum aggression,
the goal was maximum effectiveness
while respecting all these different surfaces
that are on the car, right?
Anyone can make chemistry stronger,
but making it smarter is definitely the hard part.
So to be clear, I do think these systems
absolutely have a place, neglected vehicles,
fleet cars, construction equipment,
restoration projects, something with heavy contamination,
something that you do every once in a great while, right?
Those are situations that the chemistry totally makes sense.
And I think that's where this chemistry is mainly being used,
and then we're kind of just trickling it down
to other areas of the car.
But again, I think the question becomes,
should this become your default maintenance routine?
And probably not, because I think it's just too aggressive,
right?
So the low-ph, high-ph systems definitely aren't bad,
they're tools, but like every tool,
they have a strength and a weakness.
And so I don't think the question is can they clean?
Because clearly they can, but the question is,
are they necessary weekend, week out?
And are they actually more damaging to your car
than actually just throwing a mitt on it, right?
And so again, I think the bigger question
that I always ask myself, the bigger question
that I try to solve, my big differentiator
for the Jimbo's detailing brand,
is I create a method that I'm looking for
and then create chemistry based on the result
that I'm trying to achieve.
I don't look at the current chemistry out there
and then think, okay, let's design a new method.
That's where I think the water's gotten really muddy
in the detailing space, that's why I feel like
the detailing space feels so stagnant.
It's confusing, it's annoying,
people don't know what to do, and it's because of this.
And so my big differentiator,
the hill that I'm trying to, willing to die on,
is that I start with the desired result first
and then work backwards, right?
So if that's something that interests you,
I invite you to check out the whole Jimbo's detailing line.
The Super Sober is not a high pH, low pH wash system.
It's a single liquid that cleans as good
as the low, high pH system,
but also can be used as a maintenance wash as well,
safe on ceramic coated surfaces,
safe on PPF, totally safe on everything.
And so with that, I will link everything below.
But I just wanted to give my opinion
on the low pH, high pH wash systems.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed that one.
And yeah, I'll catch you on the next one.
See ya.
About this episode
Low-pH/high-pH wash systems get reframed as an “acidic alkaline wash system,” not an exothermic gimmick. The host walks through how acidic and alkaline products are layered, why the chemistry can generate heat, and what each side targets—minerals vs oils/traffic film. They argue the detailing community needs more talk about risk factors and long-term compatibility, especially for ceramic coatings, clear coat, and trim. Still, these chemistries are “tools” for heavy contamination, not a daily default, and the host promotes a balanced maintenance approach.
Recently, acid-alkaline wash systems (sometimes called "exothermic washes") have become one of the hottest topics in the detailing industry. These systems can deliver incredible cleaning power by combining acidic and alkaline chemistry, but are they really the best solution for long-term vehicle maintenance?
In this video, I break down:
✅ What acid-alkaline wash systems are ✅ Why they work so well ✅ The science behind traffic film removal ✅ The risks nobody talks about ✅ Contact washing vs chemical washing ✅ Why I believe smarter chemistry beats stronger chemistry
I'll also explain my philosophy behind developing The Super Soaper and why I believe chemistry should simplify the method—not force you into a more complicated process.
