To the OP.

I think if you can get a high end, quality detail for $200, I think you are getting extremely good value. Yes, you can spend that amount and put it toward equipment and what not to detail yourself, but I feel like you are going to spend quite a bit more than $200 to purchase all the stuff you need in order to get an equivalent result.

The most expensive cost has always been labor (and this is true across pretty much every industry out there). Let's just say for argument sake that you value your time at around minimum wage ($10/hr). How long would you say it would take you to detail your car? 6-8 hours? $60-$80 total?

You are already looking at $300 to detail your own car. It'll cost you just about the same for someone else to do it. It just doesn't seem like you are saving a whole lot of money doing it yourself.

Time is money, right? But you can't buy back time. Might be a better to just drop the car off at a detailer and use the time you would have spent and spend it with your significant other. Keep them happy.

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In terms of pricing for detailers... I think several hundred dollars is justified. Yes... labor is a huge part of the equation, but that are a lot of things I can see that they need to factor into their costs. Detailing is a service based industry. Labor is expensive.

I just can't imagine detailers wanting to come out and detail peoples' cars for $10/hr. That's simply not reasonable. I don't even think I could get my friends to wash my car for $10/hr, let alone get them to provide all the products and equipment. I think for any established business, either mobile or brick and mortar, there's a lot of overhead that we don't account for. Taxes, utilities, costs related to business and traveling, etc.

Anyone who opens a business is doing so to make a profit. No one opens a business to lose money.

Paint correction is the removal of defects from paint. Defects are most commonly swirl marks and light scratches, which sounds like what you described seeing when the paint was viewed under direct (sun) light. This is almost always done by polishing the paint (by hand or machine), which is using abrasives (liquid polishing compounds or sandpaper) to level the paint - making a uniform surface to better reflect light, like a mirror.

The "orange peel" effect is basically the paint being uneven so it reflects light in a non-uniform manner. It's a common thing to see nowadays, especially with all the car manufacturers using new eco-friendly paints in the past decade. If you think our cars have bad orange peel, look at newer BMW. It's usually only removed by wetsanding, and wetsanding is always followed by heavy machine polishing to remove the sanding marks.

Keep in mind that any leveling of the paint (polishing, sanding) is removing paint, therefore making it thinner. Generally speaking, factory paint is already pretty thin to begin with, especially with newer cars (and especially Subaru paint). I usually recommend against wetsanding newer factory paints to remove orange peel because it can thin the paint too much, but this is more of a personal preference/peace of mind thing. I just live with the orange peel, unless the car has been repainted.

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I've been detailing cars in my spare time for the past 4 years, and I'm constantly looking ways to simultaneously improve/maintain quality and reduce time and effort. I love trying new products and experimenting with new ways to do things. If I find a product or technique I like that produces the results I want, I'm going to keep using it until I can improve it.

Not everybody's techniques, preference of product, standards, and philosophy behind detailing is going to be the same.

For $200, I don't think you can expect perfection. I think you should expect what is reasonable for 4 or 5 hours of work at best. I had a friend who, she didn't know any better, decided to take the rough side of a sponge to her dark blue Lexus. Something about bird poop not coming off. I was able to connect her with one of my friends. I think to fix one of the doors was like and hour or hour and half.

It is okay to have a budget. Everyone has bills and other priorities. If $200 is all you can spend, that's all you can spend.

Much like any other segmant of the car world, the detailing industry is consistently expanding and growing. The evolution of products and tools is at an all time high. I think if you're looking to have your car professionally detailed, $200 isn't really even in the same ball park. We have a detailer on staff and his prices start at $150 for a wash & wax and go all the way up to $1,500 for paint correction, ceramic coating, etc. Sometimes it's hard to conceptualize the amount of time, effort and money that goes into detailing a whole car. The products aren't cheap by any means.

i recently detailed a mustang WITHOUT paint correction and it took me about 8-9 hours.

it could have been 6 hours but the dog hair in that thing was INSANE. and the car was completely trashed. the 2 exhaust tips alone i spent an hour on.

anyway, normally i'd aim for 5-6 hours for a proper interior clean and exterior wash. might seem long to some people but i'd rather do a proper job

When our in house detailer does a paint correction with a full interior detail, it's anywhere from 10-14 hours of work. He's one of the best detailers on the east coast and as you stated above, people sometimes don't fathom the amount of work necessary to "detail" a car.

the general public just thinks to spray the dirt off the car.
they don't notice the swirls until you do a 50/50 shot of after polishing.

also, to many people the leather seats they have are nice and shiny..... until i bring it back to the nice matte soft leather.

here in Edmonton, there's a "detail" service called Bubbles. HORRIBLE, yet the general public loves it because they don't know what detailing is.

http://bubbles.ca/pricing

how the ef do you clean a car and polish and wax it in 2-4.5 hours?

Ha, that's laughable! Our local car wash does the same thing and they say that their "detail" takes half a day and they clay, polish and wax. It's not even possible to do all three of those things effectively within that timeframe.

In 8 hours, on a compact car, I can only manage to wash, clay, do a single-step polish, and apply sealant. Exterior only. I would love to be able to hold onto a car for at least two days for exterior detailing (and charge accordingly), but most of my clients in the area believe that what they see is 100% - In reality, I only had time (and got paid only enough) to do a 70% job. Most will balk at the price if I charged them any higher, or they'll find some schmo who can match their lower standards and charge less. For this reason, I've become much more picky about my customers.

It can be tough for the detailers working out of their homes to get into that higher-end market or even to simply find customers with a high enough standard.