About Auto Detail USA
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Auto Detail USA is a car care publication run by Shine Master Detailers LLC, the company that makes ShineMD. We build it because the information available to someone trying to look after their own car is worse than it should be, and because we needed better answers ourselves before we could formulate a product we were willing to put our name on.
Who runs this
Two co-founders. Both spend as much time abusing cars as maintaining them, which is part of why durability claims that evaporate after a few washes make us angry.
Ducky — car nut, mechanic, drift driver, motorcycle stunt rider, and the hands-on lead for product and panel testing. If something on a car needs fixing, he fixes it. If a coating claim needs checking, he is the one putting it down and reading the instruments. Instagram: @yung_duck_.
Coy White — drift driver, stunt driver, trials biker, YouTuber, and the creative and technical obsessive behind ShineMD. He rebuilds processes from first principles rather than accepting half-answered questions about how a coating behaves. Instagram: @notcoywhite. YouTube: coywhite.
Coy’s portrait on his author page is the one published on his own channel. Ducky’s is a shop photograph of him working on a car — no generated face. The social profiles above are additional checkable proof that these are real people rather than pen names.
What we cover
Paint protection and coatings, washing technique, paint correction, contamination and stain removal, wheels and tyres, interiors, glass, and the seasonal problems that damage cars predictably every year. The emphasis throughout is on the parts other guides skip: how to know when to stop polishing, which cleaner is safe on which wheel finish, whether the thing everybody repeats is actually true.
How we work
We test on prepared panels with documented methods, we publish the raw readings, and we state the limitations of every test. When we have not measured something ourselves, we say so rather than borrowing a number from another site.
We are not independent, and that shapes what you should trust us on. Trust the method, which is published in enough detail to repeat. Trust the raw data, which goes up unedited. Be appropriately sceptical of our opinion about our own product, and check it against the numbers.
Contact
Corrections, method critiques and test requests are all genuinely welcome. If a result we published does not reproduce for you, we want to know.