26/04/2026
Dry ice cleaning for the underside of your vehicle is not the same as a high pressure jet washing.
If you care about your car, have a read of this & it will help explain why there is a price difference between dry ice blasting and old fashioned pressure washing with water.
Pointing a pressure washer at your underbody and calling it a restoration is like washing your laptop with a garden hose because it needed a clean. Technically you did something. Whether you made it better is a separate question.
High pressure water doesn't just clean surfaces it gets everywhere you don't want it. Wheel bearings. Differential breathers. Wiring looms and electrical connectors. Chassis seams that were sealed from the factory. Boot joints and CV gaiters.
Anywhere that water sits and can't escape, it starts working on your vehicle immediately surface rust develops within hours on bare metal, trapped moisture in cavities takes days or weeks to escape if it ever does, and any bearing or sealed component that ingests water is now on a shortened lifespan you won't notice until it becomes a problem.
Pressure washing also does nothing for oil contamination. It moves it around, dilutes it temporarily and smears it across a wider surface area. Come back in two weeks and it looks exactly the same because water and oil don't mix the grime resurfaces as soon as it dries.
Dry ice blasting works completely differently. Frozen CO₂ pellets are accelerated at the surface and do two things simultaneously as the kinetic impact breaks the bond between the contaminant and the surface, and the rapid thermal shock causes the contamination to fracture and release. The pellets then sublimate on contact, turning directly into gas.
There is no secondary waste.
No water pooling in cavities.
No moisture sitting in bearings.
No residue on surfaces.
The contamination falls away and the CO₂ disappears into the air.
The result isn't a wet version of dirty. It's actually clean down to bare metal, bare casting, bare paint in a way that a pressure washer is physically incapable of achieving.
