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Comment by greedo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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