A wash facility’s invoice is only part of what it costs a fleet: every visit also uses a driver’s paid time and the car’s mileage to get there and back, and neither appears on the invoice. Mobile valeting on site removes both, so the fair comparison is the facility’s full cost per wash against the mobile service price.
| Cost factor | Wash facility | Mobile valeting on site |
|---|---|---|
| Price per car | The facility’s charge | Agreed per service (MMCC: Basic £45–£65, Full £75–£95) |
| Driver time | Drive, queue, wash, return | None — the car is cleaned where it is parked |
| Mileage | Round trip to the facility | None |
| Car out of use | For the length of the visit | Not moved |
| Condition record | None | 20-point inspection each visit |
| Records for ESG reporting | Collated by hand, if at all | Per-service record: date, site, registration |
What does a facility wash actually cost per car?
It costs the invoice plus the driver’s time plus the mileage. The invoice covers the facility’s labour, water, chemicals and overhead; it does not cover getting the car there. The full cost of one wash is:
Full cost = wash charge + (driver hourly cost × hours away) + (round-trip miles × cost per mile)
For the cost per mile, HMRC’s approved mileage allowance for an employee’s own car is 45p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles — a published figure intended to cover running costs, and a reasonable proxy for a car’s cost per mile. The driver’s hourly cost and the time away are the fleet’s own figures.
How do driver time and mileage add up across a fleet?
They scale with every car and every wash. As an illustration, take a fleet of 20 company cars washed fortnightly at a facility with a five-mile round trip, and put in your own figures for the wash charge and driver cost:
| Item | Per wash | Per year (520 washes) |
|---|---|---|
| Mileage: 5 miles × 45p | £2.25 | £1,170 |
| Driver time: hours away × your hourly cost | Your figure | Your figure × 520 |
| Wash charge | Your figure | Your figure × 520 |
The mileage line alone is £1,170 a year on this fleet, before a minute of driver time is counted. Driver time is usually the larger figure, because the hour a driver spends taking a car to be washed is an hour not spent on the work they are paid for.
What does it cost when cars are out of use?
The cost is lost availability. A pool car at a facility cannot be booked; a sales car in a queue is not on the way to a client. For fleets that track utilisation, time spent getting cars washed is time the fleet has paid for and not used. Mobile valeting cleans the car while it is already parked — during a meeting or a working day at the office — so the car is never out of use for cleaning.
What does a facility wash leave out of ESG reporting?
It leaves out the data. A conventional wash uses 100–150 litres of water per car; on the 20-car example, that is 52,000–78,000 litres a year. DEFRA’s 2026 GHG Conversion Factors for Company Reporting give water supply at 0.1913 kgCO2e/m³ and water treatment at 0.17088 kgCO2e/m³, which makes the water’s carbon small in absolute terms — about 19–28 kgCO2e a year here. The bigger gap is that most facility washes provide no per-car, per-site records at all, so the purchased service cannot be evidenced when an auditor asks.
A waterless mobile service draws no water on site, and MMCC records every visit by date, site and registration, with fleet records exportable as CSV. How those records are used is covered in turning water savings into ESG data.
What else does a mobile service add?
A condition record. Every MMCC visit includes a 20-point Vehicle Health Check, each point marked OK, Advisory or Urgent with photos of anything flagged, so the fleet sees damage while it is still a repair rather than a lease-return charge. A facility wash cleans the car and records nothing.
For fleets spread across several Surrey sites — from mobile car valeting in Esher to mobile car valeting in Guildford — cars stay where they work instead of running to a central wash. Pricing and programme options are on our Corporate fleet services page.
Fleet managers can compare their current wash costs with an on-site programme through a Fleet Readiness Audit.