Best car wash wax sprays 2022

Protection that goes on to a wet car or as you dry can be great for drivers who don’t have the time to get out the wax and spend an hour applying and buffing it.

As so often with labour-saving products, the protection wasn’t as good as drying a car then applying a regular wax, but new technologies have cut that gap. Ceramics, sealants and paste waxes still have the edge, but there’s only a small gap to the best wash waxes. The options have also grown, with products that go on to wet or dry cars joined by ones applied with a lance or sprayed on and rinsed immediately. 

To find the best, we applied each to the maker’s requirements and then monitored water beading over 11 weeks. Price was also taken into account in the final ranking. 

Adding protection to your paintwork doesn’t get much easier than this. After washing the car and thoroughly rinsing it, you apply Spray+Seal. It doesn’t need much, just two or three pulls per square metre, then it’s immediately rinsed away with plenty of water and dried as normal. As we have seen before with this type of product, the protection left after such a short time on the car is hard to believe. 

Spray+Seal topped our beading test results throughout and was still quickly clearing its section even after almost three months. It is pretty impressive and, along with Autobead’s Lance Sealant, the standout performer.  It also won’t break the bank, because coming in a big 750ml trigger bottle means it lasts well if used sparingly, as required by the directions. It can also be used to top up protection previously applied. Another impressive product from the revitalised Sonax range on its return to our tests.

Buy now from Amazon

You’ll need to invest in a snow foam lance and pressure washer to use this sealant. There’s also a hefty outlay for Lance Sealant, but it’s not as bad as it seems because it is diluted before use. You need just one part to four of water in your reservoir before spraying.  As with Sonax, it needs to be rinsed immediately to remove any excess, then dried as normal. The result is super-impressive protection, which kept pace with our winner until the last few weeks of the test. If you already have a pressure washer and lance, this makes a lot of sense because you’re effectively getting five litres of the mix. 

Buy now from Autobead

This is a much more conventional approach to getting protection on to a car’s paintwork quickly than the other pair here. It can be applied to wet or dry panels, and on the latter it can be used to remove water spots and other light marks. On wet panels it is sprayed then spread with one microfibre cloth before being dried with a second.  According to 303, its Spray Wax is good for 90 days’ protection, but we reckon the company is being modest, because it was still clearly working at the end of our 11-week assessment period and showed no signs of disappearing.

Buy now from Amazon

Now you can pick out the best paint protection, take a look at the best glass cleaners on sale…