The generic answer you will find online is twice a year. That advice was not written for the Mojave. Between fine airborne dust, relentless UV, and mineral-heavy water, vehicles here accumulate damage on a faster clock than they do in most of the country.
For a full detail — interior extraction plus exterior decontamination and protection — every three to four months is a realistic target for a daily driver that parks outside. Garaged vehicles can stretch to every six months. Anything longer and you are not really maintaining, you are periodically rescuing.
Between full details, the thing that matters most is how the car gets washed. A proper hand wash every two to three weeks does more for long-term paint condition than one heroic detail a year. Most of the swirl marks we correct were not put there by the environment; they were put there by wash technique, brushes, and dry towels.
Interiors here need attention more often than owners expect. Desert dust is fine enough to work deep into cloth and into every vent and seam, and it is abrasive — it slowly wears leather and plastic finishes. A vacuum-and-wipe every few weeks keeps the deep interior work from becoming a much larger job.
Headlights run on their own schedule entirely. A restored and sealed lens holds up for a couple of years here. An unsealed one — including a restoration done with polish alone and no UV coating — can start hazing again within months. If yours were done once and went yellow again quickly, that is what happened.
Paint protection is the one thing that changes the whole schedule. On a ceramic-coated vehicle, the maintenance interval stretches out considerably, because water spots rinse off rather than etch and contamination does not bond as aggressively. Coating a car is partly a way of buying yourself fewer corrective details later.
A practical schedule for most Las Vegas daily drivers: hand wash every two to three weeks, interior vacuum and wipe monthly, full detail every three to four months, and paint protection renewed or upgraded once a year. Adjust upward if the vehicle sits under trees, near sprinklers, or in an uncovered lot all day.
Not sure where your vehicle sits on that scale? We will look at it and tell you straight. Call Luxe Mobile Detail at (702) 235-1336.