One of my friends has a beautiful white Audi S5 Sportback. It's a stunning car, and it has four beautiful chrome tailpipes. However, the engine has direct injection, which produces soot, which then stains the tailpipes black. I know this from experience, as the GLI suffers from the same effect. Here's what the tailpipes look like when they're clean:
If you don't keep on top of keeping the pipes clean, they accumulate soot:
Dirty pipes that should be clean drive me crazy. Dirty pipes also expose one of my biggest automotive design pet peeves: the fake exhaust pipe. Why why why put a fake exhaust pipe on a car? You'll start seeing them when you look around - a car with more than one exhaust pipe, one of them is clean, the other is filthy. Fake pipe, just there for style. Drives me crazy, just skip it!
Anyway, back to the S5. I've been telling my friend for years that he has to clean the pipes on his S5. Every time I'd see his beautiful car, it was marred by the dirty, crusty, soot-covered pipes. You couldn't even tell the the tips were chrome. Those pipes are meant to be clean!
My friend and I work together, so one day, after verifying that he was going to be on campus, I snuck out to the parking lot, armed with some Bar Keepers Friend, a sponge, some paper towels, and some rubber gloves. After scrubbing those pipes for about 40 minutes, I got them to the point where they'd pass the "10 foot test." If you get up close to them, you can tell they need a bit more attention, but from 10 feet away, the improvement is noticeable.
I left him a little note under his windshield wiper, telling him I just couldn't take it any more. Later that evening, I got one of my favorite text messages:
I admit that I'm a strange car-obsessed man, but I think it's a good kind of strange.
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