There’s a thin line between taking pride in a clean car and clinical obsession. Step over it, warns Simon Hacker, at your peril…

Readers with young children might scratch their heads at any tribute to the world of cleaning and valeting: “Ah yes,” the thought process goes, “a clean car… I remember having one of those, before the tsunami of Britax seats, empty drinks cans, lanky-legged, boot-wielding teenagers and a menagerie of shaggy pets infested my motoring days…”

1 Ask anyone immersed in the warzone of bringing up a family and the notion of a beautifully clean and tidy machine is something they may well long for. After all, who wants to drive around in a skip? But all those parents and childminders who dream of driving around corners without activating an abandoned McDonald’s toy buried beneath the rear seat can, at least, extract some consolation from this month’s shocking Jeerbox exposé: as events turn out, getting busy with nozzles, sprays and dusters may well be a sign that your mind is not as ship-shape as your material world…

2 TV chef and apparent heart-throb Paul Hollywood dragged this dark issue from the cleaning closet when he outed himself, admitting to often cleaning his Aston Martin every couple of hours. Paul said: “I wonder if I love it a little too much. You look for little nicks, and if I see one my heart misses a beat. It (the nick) is just sitting there winding me up – it’s ruining the car. It is OCD.” Obviously no-one warned him that buying an Aston in the first place is an admission of OCD: you long to live in a fantasy world where men fight fisticuffs without creasing their tuxedos.

3 Sieve out the obvious hype from a BBC press release to promote shows linking chefs to 007’s company car and a serious issue remains: our growing obsession with primping and preening our wheels may well be nothing but a symptom for an age-old disease. It’s not a new condition. Obsessive compulsive disorder has a list of sufferers that goes back to Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, while famous OCD VIPs since US film director Howard Hughes made the condition notorious include Michael Jackson, Megan Fox, Justin Timberlake, David Beckham, Billy Bob Thornton… the list is very, very long.

4 It also includes one of the most influential figures on the history of automotive engineering: Nikola Tesla. Born in 1856 (and making it all the way to 1943), Tesla, the name that inspired the eponymous electric vehicle brand, was an inventor and electrical engineer best known for his revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism. But he was also a germophobe, disliked hair other than his own, and obsessed with dividing any activity into three stages, or numbers thus divisible. For meals, he insisted on estimating the mass of everything he was about to consume, always used eighteen napkins, and would never eat alone with a woman.

5 The tendency seems to go hand in (gloved) hand with any love of cars: a trawl of the petrolhead (dieselhead) forums online reveals the extent of the disease: “I have over the last year or so found myself more interested in seeing my car nice and shiny on the drive way than actually driving the damn thing,” says Whitey2048. Pageoneresults writes: “First rule of engagement with my automobile… don’t touch the door, ever. Second rule… don’t use your hand to hold on to the pillar while entering the car.” The issue goes on, all the way to the likes of ZephyrAMG, who opines: “People don’t understand that it’s not just “washing the car”. It’s having quality time with your honey. I wash mine just as much and I am getting the cuckoo looks from neighbours. But I don’t give a…”

6 How bad have we got it? At the last count in 2013, research from Kwik Fit revealed that we are now spending nearly £2 billion a year on car cleaning products and services, the average yearly spend being £73. Within that figure, the pop-up and established valeting businesses mop up the lion’s share of business (£603.2 million) while we even spend just short of £90 million a year on sponges. Cleanliness is next to godliness when it comes to car care, but surely we can find a better way to spend £90 million than on sponges?