Meguiars Deep Crystal 3 Step System

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Having tried just about every single car polish & wax available on the market, including creams, foams and waxes from all of the major manufacturers I had always settled for Autoglym as the best range of car cleaning products.

Having run out of Autoglym resin polish, I bought the Meguiars Deep Crystal 3 step system after finding it quite cheaply (at least compared to retail prices) on ebay.

The product consists of 3 bottles, a deep paint cleaner, a polish and a wax. Obviously, from the photos it's not a Lotus that the test was carried out on, mainly because we were concerned about how the stage one cleaner would react with the paint on the Elise, which everyone knows could be harder wearing!

My Vectra, which is a motorway warrior, 100 miles a day every day to work and back, was in real need of a good wash and a polish, so it was volunteered for the job.

It was washed first, using my usual approach, a blast with a karcher pressure washer to take the worst of the dirt off, followed by a hand wash with Autoglym car shampoo and then a second wash with a hozelock foaming brush, before being rinsed with the pressure washer a final time.

As I was leathering off the car, I could see that it had been particularly dirty, and the paint hadn't stood up to well to the constant battering of the winter salt on the M4. As you can see in the before photo of the bonnet, several areas were still really dirty, and couldn't be got out with washing alone.

With the car dry, and the sun hiding behind the clouds, it was pretty much perfect car polishing weather. The instructions on the pack say to use 100% towelling cloths, or Meguiars own foam applicator (approx £3.50 for 3) to apply the polish, and towelling cloths to polish. I chose to use towelling for both, now I'm sure Meguiars would be happy to sell you over prices clothes, but I used white cotton face cloths to apply, and white cotton hand towels to polish - and it worked really well, and it only cost about £5.00 for the the lot!

I applied the paint cleaner, and noticed that the going was pretty hard - it doesn't spread easily, and you seem to use quite a bit of it. The results however were pretty impressive. Lots of the marks that were in the paint had lifted, and the cleaner makes sort work of tar and bugs. Once the paint had been cleaned, it was clear that there was no wax or polish left, and it has cleaned down to the bare paint. Running a finger down any of the panels resulted in a squeaking noise (download video, 279Kb). It seems that the paint cleaner is not at all abrasive, it's a chemical cleaner, so it did nothing to cut the minor scratches in the paint surface. But I was very happy to see that there was no paint on the polishing cloth!

After the paint cleaner, the car looked very clean, but very flat, and at that stage I was a bit worried that maybe it'd damaged the paint.

Next up is the polish step. The polish looks very similar to the paint cleaner, but it applies much more easily that the cleaner. It is possible to use the polish very sparingly. As the polish was buffed, my fears of damaged paint disappeared, as the shine returned, better than I'd seen it since last summer! Again, the polish has no cutting element to it, it apparently helps to condition the paint, and provides a nice shine.

After the second stage, the results were the same as if I'd washed the car and just used Autoglym resin polish. I was a bit disappointed that I'd polished the entire car twice, and could have got the same results doing it just the once! The Meguiars 3 step process, still had it's trump card to play. Carnauba Wax sounds more like something you'd put on a surfboard than a car, but it really is a superb product.

The wax itself is very different in appearance to step 1 and 2, in fact it comes out looking very much like custard. The wax goes a long way again, and the finish it provides is superb. I'd been storing the polishing cloth at each stage on the bonnet, whilst I was polishing the wings, but having waxed the bonnet, there is no way that the towel was going to stay (download video, 386Kb).

With the waxing done, the car looked fabulous, much better than its five years/50,000 miles (half of those in the last year), that's for sure.

In summary, the three stage process really does a lovely job, the photo's don't do the finish justice at all, and it would look an awful lot better on a darker car, where you could appreciate the depth of the shine.

It took 3 hours from start to finish to wash an polish the car, 2 hours of that were spent polishing (including the glass) I think the results were well worth it! Hopefully now that I have done the deep clean, I will only need to top the wax up regularly to keep the shine!

Mark Williams, 26th March 2005.