Mobile car wash across Hertfordshire

How Yikes came up the A1

Yikes started in north London in 2023 and has cleaned more than 15,000 cars across the capital since. Hertfordshire is too far for our own team to reach every day, so we have done it the way the best local services do: with local people. Washes here are done by vetted local washers from the Yikes Network, independent valeters who already work Stevenage and the towns around it, and who have passed our checks.

What you see is unchanged: one booking page, London prices, a card payment held by Yikes, a washer who checks in at the car and photographs it before and after, and a wash report by text with your receipt and a link to rate the job or book the next one. What is different is who turns up: someone who lives round the corner rather than someone who has driven up from Archway. If anything is not right, Yikes sorts it.

Driving in Hertfordshire, the short version

A few things every Hertfordshire driver deals with, and how a wash that comes to you fits round them.

• Gritting started on 1 October. Hertfordshire County Council treats about 1,500 miles of priority road in typical icy weather: every A and B road, the routes to hospitals, stations and the airport, the bus routes and one road into every village of fifty houses or more, plus any hill of 10 percent or steeper. Everything else is salted only in sustained ice or snow, which means the salt on your close is what the main road sprayed in.
• The A1(M) has bypassed Stevenage since the early 1960s, and the M1, the M25 and the A10 carry the rest of the county's commute. Motorway film and brake dust are the daily deposit on anything that uses them.
• Luton Airport was approved for expansion in April 2025, from 18 million passengers a year to 32 million by the mid 2040s, with a second terminal and an extended DART link. More traffic on the M1 and the A505 for a long time.
• The trees. Stevenage alone has avenues of Norway maple and two ancient woods, and the Chilterns and the Lea Valley are no different: sap from June, leaves from October, droppings all year.

Left alone, salt dulls the clear coat, sap and droppings etch it and leaves hold damp against it. Booking an outside wash every few weeks from October to March is the cheapest way to stop all three, and for a car under three years old a ceramic coating does the job for two years at a time.

Who lives here, and the clean that suits

Stevenage, our home authority in the county, had 89,495 people in 36,510 households at the 2021 Census, 80 percent of them with a car and 38 percent with two or more. The towns around it range from the terraces and garage courts of the New Town to the drives of Harpenden and Knebworth and the flats of Hatfield and Luton, but the common thread across Hertfordshire is the commute: to London by train, to the M25 and the M1 by car, and to the airport. The car here works for its living, and it shows.

• The car that sits at the station all week: an Essential Exterior at the weekend takes off a week of film and salt.
• Households with two cars, which is most of Harpenden and Knebworth: add both to one booking and they are done in one visit.
• Muddy footwells after the Chilterns or the Lea Valley: Deluxe Inside & Out.
• A car still under warranty: a ceramic coating keeps the paint as it left the showroom.
• Company vans: priced on the booking page by size, or see the fleet page for several at once.

Read more: ceramic coating explained, sap and droppings on paint, fleet cleaning.

Hertfordshire after 2028

On 16 July 2026 the Government announced that Hertfordshire's county council and ten district councils will be replaced by four unitary councils on 1 April 2028, with elections in May 2027: Central Hertfordshire for Stevenage, most of North Herts and most of Welwyn Hatfield; North West Hertfordshire for Dacorum and St Albans; South West Hertfordshire for Hertsmere, Three Rivers and Watford; and an eastern council that includes East Herts and Broxbourne. Parking, permits and gritting all change hands. Your wash does not: it is booked with Yikes and done by the same local washer, whoever runs the town hall.