After growing frustrated with the time he spent waiting at traditional car washes, the founder of NEXA Auto Care began asking whether busy professionals would pay to have their vehicles cared for without leaving home or work. What started as a personal frustration has developed into an Aberdeen-based business with ambitions to expand across the UK.
ABERDEEN, Scotland | For many motorists, taking a car to be washed is simply another task on the weekend list. But for the founder of NEXA Auto Care, the time spent waiting for that task to be completed became the starting point for a business idea.
He estimates he was losing around two hours every month to visits to the car wash, including one occasion when he spent more than 30 minutes in a queue simply waiting to drop off his vehicle.
For a busy professional, he began to reason, the real cost was not necessarily the price of having the car cleaned. It was the time being surrendered in the process.
“For busy professionals, that time loss is worth far more than the cost of the wash itself.”
That frustration eventually became NEXA Auto Care, a platform designed to connect customers with vetted vehicle-care providers who travel to the customer’s home or workplace.
But before building the service, its founder wanted to know whether other motorists shared his frustration.
Testing the idea before launching
Rather than relying solely on his own experience, the founder says he held more than 20 informal conversations with professionals in Aberdeen.
A recurring theme emerged.
People cared about maintaining their vehicles, he said, but many disliked having to give up part of their day to do it.
NEXA then tested that interest online before the service officially launched.
According to figures provided to Pentacept Reporters by the founder, more than 300 visits to NEXA’s webpage generated over 100 waitlist registrations in less than four weeks. The company also recorded 36 prepaid bookings before going live.
For the founder, customers being prepared to pay before the service had formally launched was an important early signal.
“People were paying for a service that didn’t exist yet. That told us the demand was real.”
Building around convenience and trust
Mobile vehicle cleaning itself is not a new concept.
NEXA’s founder argues that the distinction he is trying to build lies in how the service is organised.
Rather than operating solely as an individual detailer taking bookings directly from customers, NEXA is being developed as what its founder describes as a “reliability-first marketplace.”
Customers make a booking through the platform and are matched with vetted providers who travel to their home or workplace to complete the requested service.
Prices currently start from £40, according to the company.
But the founder believes price is not necessarily the strongest factor determining whether customers return.
“Convenience gets people to try us, but trust is what brings them back.”
That trust, he says, means customers knowing who will arrive, expecting them to arrive at the agreed time and having confidence that the quality of the service will remain consistent.
For NEXA, that presents a challenge beyond simply cleaning cars.
It means attempting to create a repeatable standard across different providers and bookings.
What happens after a customer clicks ‘Book’
The experience has been deliberately kept relatively simple from the customer’s perspective.
A motorist books online, selects the size of the vehicle and required service, chooses a location and time, and completes payment.
Behind the booking, however, is a logistics operation designed to allocate work geographically.
NEXA says jobs are routed by zones, reducing the need for providers to repeatedly travel across Aberdeen between appointments.
Providers also operate under service agreements and defined scopes of work based on the service ordered by the customer.
For the founder, consistency is central to whether the marketplace model can succeed.
“Anyone can do one great valet. The challenge is delivering the same result on the fiftieth booking as on the first.”
It is an important distinction for a business hoping eventually to operate well beyond one city.
The unexpected challenge: winning over providers
When building a consumer-facing service, attracting customers might appear to be the obvious challenge.
NEXA found another difficulty: convincing independent detailing professionals to trust the platform.
Many experienced detailers have spent years building their businesses independently. According to the founder, some are understandably cautious about platforms that take commissions or impose operating requirements without delivering enough value in return.
NEXA therefore had to answer a straightforward question from potential providers: What is in it for them?
The company’s proposition is that providers can receive bookings without having to acquire every customer themselves, while zone-based scheduling can reduce time spent travelling between jobs.
The founder says NEXA also involves providers in shaping aspects of the service.
“We listen to providers, involve them in how we shape the service, and treat them as partners rather than labour.”
According to company figures shared with Pentacept Reporters, NEXA has grown to more than 90 users and completed more than 60 bookings since launching in July 2026. The founder also says it has secured two business clients.
These figures were supplied by NEXA and have not been independently audited by Pentacept Reporters.
Aberdeen as the testing ground
Despite starting in Aberdeen, NEXA’s ambitions extend considerably further.
The company is using the Scottish city as the place to test and refine its model before attempting wider expansion.
“Aberdeen is where we prove the model, not where it ends.”
Its founder says the five-year ambition is to establish operations in more than 20 UK cities.
That would require building networks of providers in each location while maintaining consistent standards as the business grows.
There are also plans to expand beyond vehicle washing and detailing into additional forms of vehicle care, potentially positioning NEXA as a broader platform through which motorists can manage different aspects of looking after their cars.
International expansion is part of the longer-term ambition, although the immediate challenge remains proving that the model can be replicated successfully across the UK.
Measuring success in hours, not only revenue
Perhaps the most unusual part of NEXA’s growth ambition is how its founder wants to measure part of the company’s impact.
Not simply in bookings.
Not just in cities.
But in hours returned to customers.
The long-term target, he says, is to help busy professionals reclaim more than 200,000 hours that might otherwise have been spent travelling to car-care businesses, sitting in queues or waiting for vehicles to be ready.
Whether NEXA ultimately reaches that target will depend on its ability to attract customers and providers while maintaining quality as it expands.
For now, the business is attempting to prove that proposition in Aberdeen.
And it began with something remarkably ordinary: one motorist sitting in a car wash queue and wondering whether there was a better way to spend his time.
