Russian YouTube channel Garage 54 has uploaded a video posing the same question that must have occurred to all of us at some point in our lives: what happens when you wash a car – in this case a Hummer H2 SUV – in minus 40 degree weather?

Well, there’s one way to find out, although the boss of Garage 54 makes it clear at the start (in Russian, but with an English voiceover) that in fact, the experiment is taking place when the ambient temperature is minus 38 degrees. Since Russia uses the metric system, he presumably means Centigrade, though the Fahrenheit figure is pretty close at minus 36.4 degrees.

The boss sprays foam over the Hummer H2, with predictable results: it freezes almost immediately. So does the next layer. Two days later, the vehicle is several inches deep in frozen pink foam. The question is no longer, “how can we wash this thing?” but “how do we get in it?”

Enough foam is scraped away to clear the windows and license plates, and to allow the boss and a driver to climb in. Within two turns of the wheels, they have been cleared of the frozen foam, but the body remains covered in it. The occupants go first to a gas station and then on to what seems to be Garage 54 itself, attracting stares and sometimes delighted laughter from pedestrians and other drivers.

Here, the pink foam disappears quickly once the Hummer H2 is indoors. It looks impressively clean in the circumstances, but we have been on a long and arduous journey.

“Washing a car outside in the winter is pretty inappropriate – and ridiculous,” says the boss at the end of the video. “You’re not getting a car clean in freezing cold weather, since, quite obviously, foam and water will simply freeze over – and quite rapidly, at that.”

Amen. To watch the full tale unfold, check out the video here:

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