August 6th, 2019 by Chris Chapman

Summer can be tough on your car’s paintwork. Bugs and drops of tree sap seem to be everywhere, and they can be tricky to remove even after a thorough detailing session. However, the biggest problems for car owners in summer are tar spots. You can snow foam and shampoo these stubborn black spots all day long and they just won’t go anywhere. It might feel like these black marks are impossible to get rid of, but there is a way! Keep reading and we’ll go through the dos and don’ts of removing tar spots.

Use a Dedicated Tar Spot Remover

It’s no good expecting to be able to scrub or jet wash tar spots away. If you’re interested in why this is, just click here! You need a proper tar spot remover to get rid of them. Our Tar-Dah! is a powerful cleaning solution that breaks down tar by soaking into it and dissolving the bond it forms with your paintwork. Despite its strong cleaning effect, it’s actually quite gentle on your car’s paint, and it can be used on all types of paintwork as well as glass, rubber, and plastic. Even better, it doesn’t just work on tar spots, meaning you can use it to clean up oil, grease marks, tree sap, bug splatter, bitumen, and more.

Follow the Instructions

Whether you use Tar-Dah! or not, you should still follow the instructions on the back of the bottle. In the case of Tar Dah!, just apply it directly onto the tar spots using a cloth. There’s no need to dilute it, you can use it neat! After this, leave it to soak in for around 3-5 minutes before wiping it away with a clean cloth. That’s all there is to it – there’s no rinsing or scrubbing required! If you’ve spent ages scrubbing away at tar spots before finding this page, this is probably a bit of a relief! However, you might also be wondering just what it is that makes tar spots so hard to get rid of. If that’s the case, keep reading – we’ll explain why dedicated tar spot removers are so important.

How Do Tar Spots Appear on My Car?

Tar spots are the result of molten tarmac splashing onto your car’s paintwork and drying. You might think you’re only at risk of this if you drive past roadworks, but that’s not quite true. Driving past roadworks does put you a little more at risk of getting tar spots as you might expect, but you can get them from any busy road on a hot day. Tarmac is black, which means it soaks up a lot of heat when the sun is shining on it all day. When you add in the friction caused by car tyres passing over it, it can melt surprisingly often. This means it’s almost a guarantee that the underside of your car as well as your tyres, wheel trims, and bumper will get a few black flecks on it throughout the summer. This is why they’re so tough to get rid of – just as you can’t scrub the road surface away with a bit of soap and water, you can’t clean tar spots off your car, either.

Why Does Tarmac Melt?

Modern tarmac is made of aggregate (the term given to ground-up construction material – usually a mix of sand, stone, bricks, and other gravelly stuff) and asphalt. Asphalt is a gooey black substance that binds all the loose aggregate together and dries to form hard tarmac, and it’s also the thing that melts at high temperatures and sticks to your car. If a road ever cracks, this crack will likely be filled in by pure asphalt (also known as bitumen), so it’s even more prone to melting! This means that damaged road surfaces are a little more likely to end up splashing tar spots onto your car. Unfortunately, until they invent a more heat-resistant road surface, tar spots are a problem that’s simply impossible to avoid. That means it’s a good idea to keep a bottle of tar spot remover around the house, especially if you love detailing your car!