Ooh yeah, C4 Corvette, that's what I'm talking about!
"I forgot to mention! The cheerleaders from your school are coming down to do a car wash for a fundraiser. $30 a car; I know that this might seem like a bit of a distraction, but I need you all to keep focus on your work. No flirting with the girls. Am I understood?"
What do you do when your work has several hot characters, but no way for them to provide Fanservice without dipping into the realm of the bizarrely perverted? You have them do a car wash!
It will normally serve as a fundraiser for the characters involved to go on a trip or buy something they need to advance the plot, but sometimes it will be gratuitously thrown in and done by background characters. The characters will just as often be shown playing around and cooling themselves off with hoses and sponges or otherwise doing something that emphasizes their beauty.
A Sub-Trope of Fanservice. Will often involve a Sexy Soaked Shirt. If the characters involved are only wearing underwear, it's a Lingerie Scene.
Examples:
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Advertising
- One ad in the gum Excel's "Bad Breath Isn't Sexy" ad campaign has an anthropomorphic coffee cup and donut doing this, with the coffee cup Foot Popping and the donut spraying the hose all over themself.
Anime & Manga
- Bakuon!!: After coming back from their road trip to Hokkaido, the girls all put on bikinis and wash their motorcycles together. The group's resident airhead Hane then decides it's easier to soap hers down with her own body instead of using a sponge.
- High School Dx D Hero: The ED features all the haremettes washing a car while wearing bikinis.
Fan Works
- Vow of Nudity: After Haara gets caught stealing litter from a succubus' backyard, Fiora convinces her not to turn them into the authorities by having Haara give her carriage a sexy scrub-down while the succubus admires the view from the inside. Haara is not thrilled about the agreement.
Films — Live-Action
- Bad Teacher: Elizabeth spices up what had been a normal and tame one by showing up in a tied shirt and daisy dukes, exploiting her sex appeal for all its worth and managing to break the school's money record in doing so.
- Played straight in both The Bikini Carwash Company and its 1993 sequel, The Bikini Carwash Company II. In the first movie, the car wash gets lots of customers but also draws the ire of Moral Guardians.
- Bottoms: In a scene antithetical to the club's self-proclaimed feminist goals, their pretty cheerleader members fundraise by washing cars. Isabel is also selling her dirty underwear.
- Bring It On: The Rancho Carne High School cheerleading team holds a bikini car wash to raise funds for an upcoming competition trip.
- One of the more famous scenes in Cool Hand Luke has the prisoners watching a blonde bombshell wash her car
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- Deep in the Valley: When Lester and Carl arrive at the sorority house, several of the sorority sisters are washing their cars in this way. It then segues into an impromptu Wet T-Shirt Contest.
- Zigzagged in DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story. When Pete suggests a car wash to raise funds to keep his "Average Joe's" gym open, the scene cuts so some bikini-clad girls washing cars, and then shows Pete and the guys standing across the street sadly leering at them. They then mention how their only customer is a creepy-looking redneck who forces the teenage Justin to wash his truck, while under the watchful eye of his pit bull.
- Ghost Shark: One notable scene features a group of several young, attractive women in barely-there bikinis washing cars, who fall victim to one of the Ghost Shark's attacks.
- Josie and the Pussycats (2001) are a trio of girl musicians chosen by Mega Records to be "the next big thing." Their first hit on the Billboard chart is "Three Small Words", which has an accompanying music video that shows Josie, Melody, and Valerie lathering up a nice car on a soundstage.
- Invoked in The Replacements (2000) when the substitute cheerleaders turn out to be a bunch of moonlighting strippers. Their halftime show involves the Donna Summer song "Bad Girls," a snazzy red car, lots of soapy water, and the kind of dancing that usually involves dollar bills stuffed into a G-string.
- Support the Girls: Lisa, the manager at Double Whammies (an Expy of Hooters), has the other waitresses at the restaurant do one of these to raise money for Shaina after she hits her Jerkass ex-boyfriend's car. It turns out Shaina is still with that boyfriend, and is using the money to pay for his hospital bills. When she finds this out, Lisa demands the money back.
- The German sci-fi comedy Traumschiff Surprise has a dream sequence that is an over-the-top parody of this. While it starts out normally (including what can only be described as "bedroom music") it ends with the woman washing her hair, shaving her legs, and brushing her teeth under the car wash shower.
- Wild Things: Kelly and one of her friends show up to Sam Lombardo's house to wash his truck. While supposedly a charity project, Kelly is clearly doing it to flirt with her teacher. It then takes a dark turn when Sam rapes Kelly. Then loops back again when it's revealed they were both faking the rape.
Live-Action TV
- Played for Laughs in Cobra Kai, where the Miyagi-Do students hold a car wash to raise money to help Miguel. One Carload of Cool Kids is expecting the bikini-clad young ladies present to do the washing, but it's Chris who cheerfully does the honors instead, complete with pressing his moobs up against the windshield as he scrubs it.
- Season 4 of Degrassi: The Next Generation sees Manny in charge of a car wash to raise money for new Spirit Squad uniforms. Manny herself wears an iconic pink bikini top and denim shorts. Gets a bit more Squicky when you realize how many of the castmembers are in their early to mid teens and look it.
- Desperate Housewives has Edie do this in an effort to get Mike's attention.
- Played for Laughs in Lost Girl when Lauren and Dyson get Distracted by the Sexy sight of Bo washing her car. She realizes what's happening and starts playing up this trope for all it's worth.
- Married... with Children: Discussed in "Honey, I Blew Up Myself". During Al's birthday, while Kelly and Bud give Al the exact clothes he's wearing as a gift, and Peggy gives him a boudoir picture, which he hates, especially when it's used on a billboard to advertise the photo studio, Jefferson gives him a coupon to a topless car wash.
- Downplayed in Rizzoli & Isles: "Over/Under" opens with a man taking his car through a high school car wash for a fundraiser, with players and cheerleaders in their uniforms helping out. Unfortunately, being a crime show, it ends with a murder.
- The Vampire Diaries: In "You're Undead To Me", the "Sexy Suds Car Wash" fundraiser event involves a lot of girls wearing bikinis. None of the guys go shirtless though.
Music
- In the music video for Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe", she washes the car wearing short shorts and a thin white tank top in an attempt to catch the eye of the attractive next-door neighbor.
- Jessica Simpson covered "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" for The Dukes of Hazzard. Hence the video ends with her in a bikini washing the General Lee.
Video Games
- Test Drive Unlimited: The sequel has a car wash for the player, which leads to a cut scene of several attractive women in crop tops and short shirts washing the player's car.
Webcomics
- In Whomp!, Ronnie sees a fundraiser where pretty girls in swimsuits are washing cars to make money; but being the bashful fellow he is, he feels too embarrassed to go there. He ends up paying a fat guy to wash his car instead. According to the Alt Text, the guy charged Ronnie double so he could afford to have his own car washed by hot girls twice.
Western Animation
- Parodied in the American Dad! episode "Helping Handis". Steve and Stan obtain breasts as a result of steroids given by the CIA. Whilst they still can, they use the opportunity to show them off by washing a car.
- Chowder is a downplayed example that combines this with No Fourth Wall, since the characters have to hold a car wash as a means to get the animation back... which essentially means the voice cast (Dwight Schultz, John DiMaggio, Tara Strong, and Nicky Jones) appearing in live-action for a quick gag. While they go about it fairly normally, Tara does tosses her hair and look flirtily into the camera when they ponder what to do, and she's the only one in a Chowder crop top instead of a T-shirt.
- In one episode of The Emperor's New School, the cheerleaders all do this to pass a class. Kuzco decides to emulate them to also pass his class, with less success.
- Family Guy:
- Inverted in the crossover episode with The Simpsons, as in an attempt at finding the Griffin family's stolen car, Peter and Homer attempt to lure the carjacker to them with a car wash that does free service for stolen cars. When it fails, the duo decide to make it up to the carjackers by giving them the car washes this way, but Fan Disservice applies since they're both overweight middle-aged men.
- In one episode, this trope is alluded to in a Cutaway Gag involving a Nickelodeon show. In the bit, a teenage actress appears on screen wearing a bikini. She explains that she's doing this for a car wash to raise money for soccer uniforms. The narrator then tells the parents watching the show to go to the bathroom and google the actress.
- Futurama: In "Neutopia", the women of Planet Express — Leela, Amy, and LaBarbara (hired solely for this purpose) — are recruited to pose for a Charity Workplace Calendar. One of the last scenes of the sequence has them washing the ship in bikinis; in reality, that's just how they normally wash the ship.
- Also in "Love and Rocket" Fry and Bender watch Amy in a bikini washing the Planet Express Ship; since Bender was dating the ship at the time, it counts as Girl on Girl Is Hot.
- Inverted in SpongeBob SquarePants. In one episode, Mr. Krabs is wearing Pearl's pants and shakes his booty in front of a depressed SpongeBob (who had failed his boating test again) while washing his boat.
