When car washing gets a premium makeover

London: One of Gurcharn Sahota’s most valued — and valuable — customers keeps his cars in a special garage divided into rooms.

One just for his Ferraris (red walls, black floors), another for the Lamborghinis (white walls and floors) and then there is one filled with Porsches (light grey). In total, there are 138 cars. The priciest — a vintage Ferrari 250 GTO — would probably sell for about £25 million.

Another client, worth about £7 billion, parks his car in the foyer of the house so it is the first thing he sees when he comes through the front door or down the spiral staircase from his bedroom.

The 34-year-old Sahota is an uber-valet, charging up to £10,000 to clean, polish and preserve some of the most expensive cars in the world. This is no soap and bucket treatment but a rejuvenation of the vehicles’ paintwork, or detailing as he describes it.

He has invented special coatings and waxes, which, he says, make cars look better than their showroom condition. Car owners even send their collections from the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

He works from a garage in Knightsbridge, one of London’s prime property hotshots. In the same road is an estate agent with flats on the market for £8 million. It is also home to Petrus, the Michelin-starred restaurant that made the news in 2001 when investment bankers spent more than £40,000 on beverages.

By his account, the value of the cars that his business, Elite Detailing and Protection, takes on every year amounts to about £1 billion. He has a garage in Hong Kong and hopes to open one in Dubai.

“Passion” is such a business cliché that it barely registers. However, sometimes you meet such enthusiasts, like Sahota, for whom the description seems rather feeble. For when our interview ends, Sahota is following me down the street talking about different types of sports car, paint and polish, only stopping as I run for the bus.

No doubt he ran into a fellow car enthusiast to talk to though. “It’s impossible [to] walk from here to Harrods and [not] get stopped,” he says. This habit of being diverted by his passion is a source of many an argument with his wife.

As a child he would take his toy cars everywhere — to the bath, bed, school. One of his favourite pastimes was cleaning his dad’s car. “Just spending time with the car, just me and the car, no one else.”

Today, he finds the best way to unwind is by driving his Mercedes-AMG alone, in silence (apart from the sound of the engine).

Originally from Derby, Sahota is the son of Punjabi migrants — his father owned a minicab business and his mother was a housewife. When he needed motivation for his accountancy exams at Birmingham University, he would go to car showrooms to look at Porsches, Ferraris and Aston Martins: if he studied, he hoped, he could get a good job and buy an expensive car.

There were also trips to his friend’s garage where he would cast his critical eye over the paint jobs. “I was never really happy with his work ... I just kept doing his head in, to be honest.”

In the end he ditched the accountancy, much to his mother’s disappointment, and focused instead on the cars. “I make more money now than [I would have] being an accountant. I’m my own boss, I do my own thing and it’s an adventure.”

In 2006 with just £1,500 to spend on cleaning kit, he offered his services for free, travelling the country to build a portfolio of clients and a reputation. The financial crisis made no difference to him as he was living at home and not earning a wage in any case.

In an attempt to master his craft, he asked a dealership if they would let him experiment with his cleaning techniques on their cars, for no pay. He spent an entire day buffing one car door. The following day he did another, much to the ridicule of the sales staff.

His customers have changed since he started. “Originally it was just pure car fanatics. Now, although I’m still getting the car fanatics, I’m getting people who want to make money.” Largely they are bankers and entrepreneurs.

His female customers tend to own Ferraris. “If they’re into nice clothes, they’re into keeping themselves looking good ... If a car doesn’t look right or it’s dirty, it’s not portraying the right image.”

One of the biggest expenses is insurance, which he describes as “a joke — it’s a lot of money”.

Today, he employs three men full time and one part-time in London. He is inundated by requests from people wanting a job. “We work on such amazing cars, a lot of them just want to look at [them] but they actually don’t want to work. They don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t want anyone loose on a car ... we work on such valuable cars.”

So he tests candidates by grilling them. It starts softly: what their favourite car is, what they like about that car, before proceeding to inquiring about the difference between the bumpers of different vintages, the name of the colour in the brochure, the engine power, and so on.

His employees are car fanatics: “You’re not going to be able to do this job well if you’re not mad about cars. You can’t treat it as a job ... You have to treat the car like it was your own.”

He tends to recruit mechanics or technicians who have expertise in paintwork. “They’ve got an understanding of how parts are fitted on to a car, how they’re painted, how to refine the finish of the paint to a real [shine].” Nonetheless, he thinks it takes about four months to train them on the job.

The cleaner he applies to the cars is the steamer used in hospitals to kill the MRSA bacteria. Deionising gel removes brown dots — airborne iron that sticks to the car and rusts — that are invisible to the naked eye.

“You’ll find the car looks different but you won’t be able to work out why.”

Having built a customer base he is able to act as a broker for people looking to trade and buy classic cars. Sahota is also in the process of setting up an investment club for classic cars worth in the region of 500,000 pounds to £750,000 each.

Not only will investors get to drive the cars but also — hopefully — to see a return on their investment.

The work can be unpredictable. Cars might be dropped off in the middle of the night or his team might be required to skip sleep in order to fulfil a cleaning order. Because the work is so labour-intensive, profits are low, he says.

Despite the wealth and the beautiful cars, Sahota insists he never gets jealous. “I get so much satisfaction working on cars. They’re pieces of art.”

— Financial Times