If you didn’t grow up in Texas, you might take the “everything’s bigger in Texas” bit as a joke. I can assure you that it is no joke. Endowed with wide open spaces and an indefatigable desire to be noticed, there’s a certain type of Texan who sees it as their duty to achieve the maximum. Few places embrace this bigness better than the Buc-cee’s chain of gas stations.
The gas station has existed almost as long as the car has and many have attempted to gain attention through novelty, most notably South of the Border in South Carolina. No fuel stop in my lifetime has gained the notoriety of Buc-ee’s, which can boast being the best and biggest in many petrol station-related categories.
I don’t think I need to go into great detail about the history of Buc-ee’s as everyone seems to know the place. Just this weekend I saw the famous Buc-ee’s billboard on the New Jersey Turnpike that encourages drivers to make a u-turn and head 581 miles in the other direction to get to the nearest outpost. My daughter’s teacher has a Buc-ee’s sticker on his wall. If you do need a refresher you can read this.
As the official Buc-ee’s correspondent here at The Autopian, I thought I’d talk about the company’s longest gas station, which is going viral for some reason.
Yes, It’s Real And It’s Fantastic
Texans love a superlative, and at 255-feet long, the Buc-ee’s car wash in Katy, Texas is indeed the longest car wash in the world. If you watch any videos of people going through it, you’ll see that it takes almost a full five minutes to go from start to finish:
As of last year, the price for a basic wash was $13 and “the works” was $16. That’s not a bad deal.
As you approach the gas station there are four automated lanes where you can choose the wash you want (do you want “free tire shine?”).
As you can see in the video, once you’ve made your selection you drive around to an attendant who helps line you up on the conveyer belt that puts you in the car wash (assuming you remember to take your foot off the brake and toss it into neutral). From there it’s mostly just a car wash, although one that starts in a very specific way.
You miss it a bit in the video above, so watch the ABC13 video if you want to see how the car wash sprays the window with foam so that the image of Buc-cee the Beaver (he of the Beaver Nugget) can be projected onto it.
Otherwise, it’s just a super long car wash that allows more cars to pass through at the same time. It has the colored foam that’s super popular now (our local car wash also has this, although the car wash itself is only about a quarter the length of Buc-ee’s).
Other than the pursuit of a superlative, the volume is probably a reason why Buc-cee’s did this according to the NACS:
The value of incorporating a car wash on the same premises as a convenience store or gas station is clear—increased potential for a high-margin addition to the business and building customer loyalty.
Though, for Buc-cee’s, the notoriety is probably a good enough reason.
Why Do We Care Now?
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As with most things Buc-ee’s, this story just went viral recently even though the original record was given way back in 2017 after the car wash was opened.
The slickly-produced Instagram reel from Texas Love List is probably why. That reel alone has 6.7 million views. And this one from TikTok has over a million. People go crazy for Buc-ee’s food, apparel, world’s largest gas station, et cetera.
Since going viral people keep sharing Buc-cee’s videos and it’s a reminder that, if you have the choice, why would you go to any other gas station?
Genius. Spend 20 minutes getting into the parking lot. Spend 30 minutes buying take-out food that you’re not allowed to eat inside the store. While going through the world’s longest car wash you can scarf down the food. Spend 20 minutes getting out of the parking lot. Figure another few minutes for puttering around and you’re on your way in a scant 90 minutes.
Amen to this. I now skip the three Bucc-ees on my trips from Indiana to Florida because of this hassle. That and idiots thinking that parking at pump, unloading the whole family to go inside and come back 30 minutes later is a good thing.
“Spend 30 minutes buying take-out food that you’re not allowed to eat inside the store.”
Wait, what? What kind of draconian bullshit is this?
There are no tables or any place to sit inside. If you stood in a corner and ate your food I can’t say they would ask you not to, but it’s obvious you’re not supposed to.
My friend and I stopped at one of these earlier this year. After all the hype, I was unimpressed. A majorly overcrowded grocery store that smelled strongly of a ham sandwich. A line just to get in the parking lot, a longer line still to get gas. The parking lot was like driving in a developing country. It was overwhelming just being inside the place, with so many people and children running around everywhere.
I know I’m a minority here, but I don’t eat much when I travel. I only stop to use the bathroom, stretch, smoke a cigarette (I don’t smoke in my car), and then hit the road again. I generally prefer rest areas. They’re rarely crowded, and many feature nice little walking paths and picnic benches. The restrooms aren’t aesthetically pleasing, but are usually pretty clean as they keep cleaning staff on hand 24/7. For fuel I usually hit up a Pilot or the like, they’re less crowded, and there’s never been a line for gas/diesel.
I suppose if you have kids, or are one of those lucky folks who can eat on the go, then Buc-ees makes more sense. But it’s not my kind of place.
“A line just to get in the parking lot, a longer line still to get gas”
This seems to be a cultural thing in the South. There’s always some store or fast food joint that they’re mobbing. Presumably because everyone else is doing it..
As a truck driver I refuse to visit a Buccees on general principles due to their no trucks stance. That being said, I can understand their stance on truckers, after seeing what modern new school steering wheel holder no driving worthless so called truck drivers have done to truck stops. Makes an old school guy like me wanna cry.
Questions:
If you’re gonna make the longest car wash, why not make it big enough for big rigs and trailers?
Is the track wide enough for wide tires on the Viper and such?
Does anyone actually spring for the undercarriage in Texas?
“High margin” is weasel speak for overpriced.
Buck Fuc-ee’s.
As an east coaster, I didn’t learn about Buc-ee’s existence until into my teens. I still like to mentally pronounce it “byou-cheese.”
Long car wash is cool, but I’ve got two questions…first, are there separate “soft touch” and “touchless” lanes, and does it have those damn air dryers at the end of all of them?
The disappearance of any place that has had people hand-drying a car (since I guess it’ll be a long time before anything can automate that well…) means that every freakin’ time, the long rubber channel pieces that run the length of my roof blow out and dangle until I can pull over after and fix them.
Every car wash I’ve used in Boston, Philly, New Jersey and NYC has offered hand drying. Can’t speak to other jurisdictions, but they are easy to find in those areas.
The car wash tunnel in Bloomsburg when I went to college there years ago, during my time there, had both air dryers and towel people, and then one day I see the sign saying they’ll no longer be towel-drying your car.
In any case–I just don’t see them as often as I recall seeing them when I was younger, and specifically avoiding air-drying ones is hard.
In Ottawa, ON near where I live there are maybe two. In a city of well over a million. We always use the hand dry ones where in the States.
There is one in the Netherlands which is 100 meters, so that would be over 300 feet.
https://www.gelings.nl/ons/
To be honest, the track is divided two sections, after the pre-wash section the track stops and you are directed to one of the two wash tracks. So depending on how busy it is they have either one or two wash tracks in action.
At the end of the wash section there is a conveyer section where they do the interior of the car.
I was literally about to comment this, but you beat me to it! I wash my car there occasionally. Measuring on google maps it’s about 100m long (320 feet) and it’s existed since 1975. Even the name translates to “Geling’s longest car wash” but I didn’t realise it was the longest until I looked it up.
Yeah but 255 > 100.
USA! USA!
As a former Texan, I have always loathed Buc-ee’s. The traffic is always absurd, and I’ve never seen the appeal of wasting time in a convenience store. Whenever I am in Texas and need gas, if there is a Buc-ee’s nearby I always go to the non-Buc-ee’s gas stations that are always kitty-corner, as they are always easier to get into/out of, near empty, and selling gas for 10-cents less. This new giant car wash will serve only to make me cringe more the next time I am visiting my friends and relatives in Katy…
Yet still no mention of the mysterious origins of Buc-ee’s proprietary “Beaver Wax”…
Is that used for Brazilians?
No. You must be an American citizen to be allowed to buy that.
Turtle Wax is expensive because turtles have such small ears. Is Beaver Wax expensive? Asking for a friend.
I’m no fan of Texas, but Buc-ee’s is something you just have to experience to appreciate. I love the food, and there’s so much to looky-loo at it provides a good distraction on a long road trip.
They’re planning one up in Wisco, at the I-90/39 split, which would harvest travellers heading into the north woods or to the Dells. I would suggest one in Illinois, near the I-80/39 interchange in LaSalle/Peru. The shear volume of traffic on I-80 would provide plenty of customers.
Wisco?
People are calling it “Wisco” now? I’ve been away for far too long.
I call it ‘Sconsin
I’ve lived in Wisco for eight years, so I can confirm that people have been calling Wisco Wisco for at least that long.
I don’t know why, but I find this news somewhat horrifying. To my ears, “Wisco” sounds like a set of regional grocery stores.
When I lived in Minnesota, I called WI the land of beer, cheese and fireworks.
Ah, Winco in the PNW!
I usually just refer to it as “behind the cheddar curtain”.
Chalk me up as someone who doesn’t get the hype. While I’ve never been to a Buc-ees specifically, I’ve been to other giant tourist trap gas station travel centers (like EddieWorld in California) and I didn’t get the appeal. Maybe it’s because I’m against ridiculous excess for the sake of ridiculous excess, plus I’m a tactical shopper who generally wants to spend as little time inside stores as possible – I make it a game to get in and out of Costco as fast as I can.
The narrative that Texas is endowed with wide open spaces isn’t really accurate either. Texas has hardly any public land. Virtually all of the “wide open spaces” you’d see there is privately owned. This is a very odd concept to me as a Californian considering I can drive about an hour from home and be on public land where I can then drive practically anywhere I want for hundreds of miles across open spaces. This map was pretty eye opening to me.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwabqgwddeam81.png
Wow! I want rent money from Nevada.
“ if you have the choice, why would you go to any other gas station?”
To fill up with top tier gas.
I’ve stopped at Buc-ees numerous times, but have only gotten gas there once.
I only get brisket and sausage-and-egg biscuit sandwiches. Both are STELLAR.
I just go for the wall of jerky and shake my head at the “Secede” swag in the gift shop.
I like their bohemian garlic jerky but the missus prefers their ghost pepper jerky.
I suspect the CSA would have been all “What do we need with a new-fangled internal combustion engine when we have slaves?” in which case Buc-ees probably wouldn’t exist. Or maybe they’d sell oats and this would be a horse bath.
So, just what is the world’s longest car and is it a sound economical model to build a car wash just for that car?
I think it has to be this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNlXl7cQaNA
Welcome to Buc-ee’s. I love you.
Yeah, I know this place pretty good. I went to law school here.
They have a law school inside Buc-ee’s? They truly do have everything
Wait until you see their Starbucks.
“ if you have the choice, why would you go to any other gas station?”
I hit the Buc-ee’s in Florence, SC on my way to Myrtle Beach. The traffic in the parking lot rivaled midtown Manhattan. Took me almost 15 minutes to get back on the highway.
I got that beat, we stopped at the Buc-ee’s in Alabama on our way to Florida and took us a solid 35 minutes to get out of the parking lot.
That’s the one I’ve been to, I chalk it up to Southern-style infrastructure management.
I guess the one in my town, at 225 feet, is now just the longest in Canada. Maybe the one the same company is building in Mississauga will take the longest in the world crown back? We took my wife’s already well scratched and marked car through once as a novelty. It was indeed quite long, and the car was cleaner when we got out.
https://www.carwash.com/longest-carwashes/
Shame on you using SAE units! What manner of Canadian are you???
If they could make it a car wash that charged an EV, safely, while doing a car wash, I’d be impressed.
High voltage electricity, high pressure water. What could go wrong?
They were doing well before, but now they’re really going to clean up.
Oh, c’mon. They just routed the vehicles through the 100 yard long bathroom.
Buc-cee’s (is it pronounced “buck-ee’s, or
Gary“Busey’s”?) just looks like an absolute nightmare.I try to spend as little time as I can at a gas station. I rarely filled up at the gas station that’s hundreds of feet from my house, until they installed pay-at-the-pump systems.
The only thing that ever draws me inside the actual building is that it is also a liqour store, which again, is hundreds of feet from my house.
Don’t knock it until you try it. Fresh brisket is almost always available and they have a beef jerky bar. Buc-ee’s not your normal gas station. I am with you in most cases, but I rarely drive past a Buc-ee’s without stopping. It is truly something to behold.
It’s pronounced Bucky’s, and yes. It is horrible. I have been to them several times having had the displeasure of living in Texas for a while. Even on a Sunday morning they are insanely packed, if you actually intend to get anything you will be inside for at least a half hour by the time you pee, fight through the crowds to get what you’re after, and wait in the line to check out. I don’t understand the obsession. Sure I guess it’s cool that I can get a BBQ grill and a couch from a gas station, but you know where else I can get those things? At a million less crowded, less overpriced places. No thanks.
A good friend and her Mom were planning to drive close to 50 miles (each way) last weekend to eat at the Bucee’s off I-10 in Alabama.
They asked me to come and join them for lunch.
After I quit laughing, politely declined.
My mind flashed back to our last sort of decent hurricane.
And how I sat parked on I-10 for 2 hours just trying to reach the exit ramp for Bucee’s.
I was just hoping to get a few gallons so everyone on my street could run generators, and have power again for a while.
Of course there was no way to actually enter the place, as the cops had blocked off access to the entrance. Good times. /s
It’s a good road trip stop. You need to be out of the car ever 2 hours for 15 minutes or so. (Yes you do, stop agruing because that clot is gonna get the last word.) The bathrooms are clean, you’re out of the weather, there’s food(which is inconsistant, to be fair), and the gas is relatively cheap. We stop at two of them each way on the annual Disney World trip. It’s not as good as the Pennsylvania and Ohio Turnpike stops, but still pretty easy to get in and out of one, if you want to do things quickly. The only problem is my mother in law is a junk shop junky, so we have to pull her away from the tchotchkes.
It’s considerably better than the banjo stations that sell sell “bolled p-nuts”.
No one in the know buys gas there.
Women value nice clean restrooms and Buc-cees are near surgical suite level of cleanliness.
That’s the draw for my clan.
And at least in Kentucky they were by far the lowest gas price in the area. I assume they’re like Costco and wholesale the petroleum making their profits elsewhere.
The bathroom thing makes sense.
In the Northeast, we have actual rest stops run by the Thruway, MassPike, etc. So that you don’t need to exit the highway at all. The bathrooms are hit and miss, clean sometimes, and other times like someone came in and ran a diarrhea machine in each stall for 10 minutes apiece. We’d probably be more willing to deal with getting off the highway to some sort of monster truck stop if the bathrooms were guaranteed to be super clean.
I’m not a fan of monster-sized convenience stores, personally. There’s a great irony that people in my city want to constantly tear down buildings for parking, and refuse to park a block or two away from their destination, yet are willing to spend 10 minutes walking through a quarter mile of a Wal-Mart parking lot, or in this case, 500 steps for a Big Gulp (not that we couldn’t all use the exercise).
Our local (and impossibly dominant) gas station chain (Stewart’s) is nowhere near the scale of this, but I miss their older more neighborhood like, quick park, 20 steps in and out concept for, you know, the convenience. They’re just about done tearing every original one down for jumbo-sized versions that often involve taking over and tearing down adjacent housing. I don’t need my convenience store to be a big box store in disguise? I just need to get the things I’d expect, as quickly as possible.
Not trying to be Buzz Killington here, but after seeing so many extreme versions of excess over the past 20 or so years, Buc-ee’s doesn’t really impress me much. I’ve been desensitized. And how does making the carwash longer increase volume anyway? It’s still one line?
“And how does making the carwash longer increase volume anyway? It’s still one line?” More people/cars can fit at once I guess.
But if the carwash was shorter, those cars would just be… finished with their car wash. The length doesn’t do anything to increase volume, only flow rate (really speed, as area is held constant to one car) matters here. Unless the goal is to just have the most cars being washed at the same time. In that case… ok? I don’t know, I don’t think I’m getting it.
I love taking the kids through the carwash, it’s fun, but I the novelty wears off after a bit. Unless this carwash performs better than others, I don’t see the value in spending more time in there.
They are much more fun if you duct tape the kids to the roof rack.
Car washes are expensive. I can’t afford both a wash, and all that duct tape! Granted, one kid would probably go up there willingly. The other would call CPS.
When I was a kid my old man had a thing when at the car wash.
If we were on a long trip he would send the kids into the store to buy crap to eat. Back then they would sell beer to a 6 year old if he could point at a car out in the lot and claim it was their parents…Believe me I know.
Then he would exit the car wash and hide the car behind the gas station.
This was also his go to thing when we would spend the night at a Motel or Hotel. Drive the car to the farthest out of sight area and hide.
As a law enforcement officer. Not a good look.
No wonder my Mom divorced his sorry ass ASAP. lol.
As long as conveyor speed increases faster than the length of time it takes to wash, volume will increase. Longer tunnels do make it possible to wash more cars per hour.
Right, I guess that was my question, are these cars being ripped through the tunnel at twice the speed? Then yes, volume goes up. But I’d have to wonder if that’s a great strategy for actually ending up with a clean car.
I’m strangely and uniquely qualified to know this…that’s why the tunnel length matters. Need a certain amount of time and space for each piece of equipment to really function properly and clean a car. If you extend the tunnel, you can equip it such that it has sufficient equipment and space to get a clean car for the speed you’re running the conveyor.
I will certainly take your word for it considering strange and unique qualifications.
Now I’m actually fascinated by the idea of my van being dragged through a carwash at far greater speeds than I am typically used to.
It really is dizzying to go through wash at roughly 1.25MPH vs 1. 25% faster makes a huge difference!
And what happens if one car somehow gets stuck due to equipment malfunction or driver stupidity? Sounds like a recipe for mass panic.
If we had Japanese style 7/11s in Canada, I’d frequent them more.
I went to a 7/11 in Norway (Oslo) and it was simply a super compact grocery store. It was really nice and completely blew my mind as the only 7/11s I’d been to were on Long Island.
The amount of people I see that will park in the aisle and block all traffic waiting for someone to pull out, when there’s an already empty spot 9 spaces away, is mind blowing. I grab the first spot I see and I’m already in the store while these jabroni’s are still driving around.
Those people are already committed to walking the perimeter of what is essentially a 200,000 sqft warehouse. I’ll never understand the effort that goes into avoiding a few extra steps in that situation.
By the time I get there, the first 10 rows are filled.
Bucees billboards have become the current manifestation of “how do you do, fellow kids.”
They’re going full “X Miles to Pedro’s” on 95, to be sure.
I drove to Austin a month ago, and holy shit is this correct. My teenage kids were wincing at each one.
Buc-ee’s Built The World’s Largest Car
WashScratching Machine Just Because They CouldBingo. I saw the headline, all I could picture was the swirl marks all over the car.
I was going to say something about taking an angle grinder to my car, as it’d look just as good when I’m done with this car wash.
Wonder if the inevitable scratches are beaver shaped? Never use contact rotating car wash devices!
“We Gnaw The Dirt Away!”
You need a long car wash for that loooong RAM truck from yesterday.