The cleaning of fleets of vehicles is definitely a good place to be if you are a mobile car wash operator. There is a tremendous amount of competition going to office buildings to wash cars, and there are so many competitors in the marketplace, that they really have driven the price down quite low. It's not that you can't make money doing it, if you are very efficient and you have a good working crew, it's just that there are fewer cars to clean divided-up amongst the competition.
Likewise, in the recession, middle-class America has less money to spend. This is why many vehicle washers are going into company fleet washing. Now then you've probably asked yourself in the past or perhaps asked a pressure washer sales person; "Should I By a Cold or Hot Water Pressure Washer for Fleet Vehicle Cleaning?"
The reason you use hot water is to clean the grease off the vehicles, however if there is never any grease, soot, or petroleum distillates which will cause the dirt stick in an oily fashion go with cold water because if none of these things exist, you're better off to save the money and work with a cold water pressure washer for several reasons;
The first, and major reason is there is less Murphy'ism, that is to say less things to go wrong, less maintenance on the machine, and the coils are very heavy. So if you're working out of a very small pickup truck, such as a small Toyota, or Ford Ranger, you save the weight. You will need the extra weight for the water because water weighs 8.2 pounds per gallon. If you are working on the flat bed truck, or a trailer rig and the weight is generally not an issue. However you might need trailer brakes, especially if you also have a water tank on it, unless you have a very large pickup, such as a dually.
Some of our rigs in the past, have had both cold water and hot-water pressure washers on them. That way they could run the hot water steam cleaners cleaning sidewalks, agricultural equipment, railroad equipment, and over the road trucks; even clean graffiti.
And, if they were to washing cars for Enterprise Rent a Car, Budget, Avis, or Hertz - or cleaning car lots for Lithia, Carmax, AutoNation, United Auto, AutoOne - or post office jeeps or delivery vans, they didn't even have to turn on steam cleaner, or the correct term is actually "hot water pressure washer" - incidentally, you can run a hot-water pressure washer without ever turning on the heat obviously, but you are still running water through the coils, and generally these large skid units have larger motors, meaning you will use more gasoline, or in some cases diesel, then you would if you just fired up a small Honda pressure washer.
Over the course of a day of 10 hours, that's a lot of extra fuel. Fuel is quite expensive these days. A large hot-water pressure washer could easily use to it happened 3 gallons per hour, but a little pressure washer can run for 2 or 3, sometimes four hours on a single or two gallon tank - if you run them at 2/3 power. That is something to think about if you want to be efficient and save money with the cost.
