Minimum traffic to support 1 single in bay touchless automatic

[rivaitan]

Hi all,

I'm slightly confused about certain articles recommending a minimum of 20000 cars per day for a viability of a car wash business. Hopefully someone can shed some light on this.

I'm in Singapore. There are no automatic touchless car washes here so this will be the first. Due to space constraints I will probably only have a single bay per site. The first location that I'm looking at has an ideal layout - I'm talking single bay, ability to stack 3 cars, and good parallel road frontage. The 'problem'? I count probably 12000 cars per day (excludes taxicabs, and excludes traffic on the opposite road that can actually see the wash, but will have to make a U-turn about 200 meters down the road to access it). And based on the books I've read, minimum recommendation is 20000 to 30000 cars per day at least. Yet some other checklists seem to suggest that 3000 cars a day would work. Which is it?

Appreciate any comments please.

 

[robert roman]

If you want to gain some perspective about relationship between the customer attraction rate and customer loyalty rate, you may be interested in reading the following.

http://www.carwashmag.com/home/arti...ulation/649308d71e6bd6f64c60740e4f800051.html

As for – minimum highway traffic to support one single in bay touch-less automatic – I don’t suspect this will be much of a problem.

Since automatic carwash will be new product/service in market, I’m sure the curiosity factor alone will have you slammed. If you do a good job, you will be only game in town, short-term.

Arguably, a three vehicle queue would probably be insufficient. Reason is waiting line characteristics.

For example, average wash time for in-bay is 5 minutes or about 12 cars an hour. If arrival rate of customers about nine an hour, 40 percent of the time there will be about four cars in the waiting line.

Once the random arrival rate exceeds nine customers, the average waiting time and average length of the waiting line will grow infinitely long (as in lined up down the street) as long as customers continue to arrive.

Good problem to have until someone inevitably builds another wash.

So, I might plan for 10 vehicle stacking. Unless customers arrive in big bunches all the time, this should cover you most of the time for up to about 75 percent of capacity.

According to some in-bay experts, customer attraction rate will suffer once vehicle stacking is five vehicles or less.