Mobile car wash across Medway and North Kent

How Yikes came down the A2

Yikes started in north London in 2023 and has cleaned more than 15,000 cars across the capital since. North Kent 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 the Medway towns and the roads around them, and who have passed our checks.

Nothing else changes. You book on the same page at the same prices, your card is handled by Yikes, and the washer checks in at the car and photographs it before and after. You get the same wash report and receipt as any Yikes customer, and you can rate the wash or book the next one from the same text. If anything is not right, you deal with Yikes, not with a stranger's mobile number.

Driving in North Kent, the short version

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

• The Dartford Crossing costs £3.50 a crossing for a car, or £2.80 with a pre-pay account, from 6am to 10pm every day. Crossings between 10pm and 6am are free, vans pay £4.20 and motorcycles pay nothing. You have until 11.59pm the day after to pay, and the penalty for forgetting starts at £70.
• The Lower Thames Crossing, a tunnel between Gravesend and Tilbury, got its development consent in March 2025 and early construction began in March 2026, with opening expected in the early 2030s. Years of site traffic on the A2 and A226 around Gravesend and Shorne are the practical result for now.
• Gritting season runs from mid October to mid April in Medway, which treats major roads, bus routes and danger spots first from a stock of 4,000 tonnes of salt. Kent County Council covers the rest of the region with 60 salting vehicles and 23,000 tonnes, treating about 30 percent of the county's roads on its primary routes, including every A and B road.
• Chalk and estuary are the two things that mark a car here. The Downs give a fine white dust in dry weather; the Thames and Medway estuaries give a salt tinged film that dulls paint and smears glass.

Salt, chalk, sap and leaves all sit on paint for weeks if they are left. An outside wash every few weeks through autumn and winter is the simplest way to keep on top of them, and a ceramic coating is the long term answer for a newer car.

Who lives here, and the clean that suits

The 2021 Census counted 279,773 people in Medway alone, in 111,458 households, and the council put the figure at 292,655 by 2024. It is car country: 81 percent of Medway households have at least one car or van and 40 percent have two or more, against a national picture of far fewer. Fewer than one home in six is a flat, and two thirds are owner occupied. The towns along the Thames at Gravesend and Dartford are denser and the villages on the Downs are greener, but the drive at the front of the house is the common thread, and that is where most of our washes here happen.

• Two cars on the drive: book both and your washer does them together, each with its own wash report.
• A car that commutes on the M2, M20 or A2: Essential Inside & Out every few weeks takes off the traffic film and the brake dust.
• The family car after a weekend on the Downs or the marshes: Deluxe Inside & Out, with the mud vacuumed out of the footwells.
• A newer car facing the estuary: a ceramic coating puts a hard layer between the paint and the salt air for two years.
• Vans and fleets: the booking page prices larger vehicles for you, and our fleet page covers several at once.

More on this: what a ceramic coating actually does, why bird droppings and sap damage paint and cleaning for business vehicles.

Medway and North Kent after 2028

The map of local government here is changing. Medway Council, formed in 1998 from Rochester-upon-Medway and Gillingham, is to be abolished on 1 April 2028 and replaced by a new North Kent unitary authority, with elections to the shadow authority on 6 May 2027. Kent County Council reported the ministers' decision as a northern council covering the areas now served by Dartford, Gravesham and Medway. For a car wash it changes nothing, but it is why we call this region Medway and North Kent rather than Kent: the Thames side of the county is becoming one place, and we cover all of it.