Express Wash Concepts Acquires CleanHub Car Wash

• Express Wash Concepts, an express car wash operator based in Columbus, Ohio, bought three CleanHub Car Wash locations in metro Detroit: Shelby Township, Sterling Heights and Oxford, Michigan. It appears to be the whole CleanHub chain. Price, terms and advisors were not disclosed.
• The three sites will close briefly and reopen in mid-November as Clean Express Auto Wash after upgrades to equipment, technology and branding. CleanHub unlimited members move automatically to a premium EWC membership at $20 a month for six months, and billing is paused while the sites are closed.
• EWC now has 147 express locations in six states under five brands. Clean Express alone reaches 21 sites across the Detroit and Flint markets.

The deal shows that large regional platforms keep buying small independent chains to fill in the markets they’re focused on, rather than relying on new builds alone. EWC has made repeated add-on acquisitions in metro Detroit, including earlier Cosmo’s Car Wash and Roseville deals, which suggests the region’s suburban corridors are a high priority for consolidators. For owners of three- to five-site independent chains, deals like this show that strategic buyers will pay for established locations with an existing membership base that they can rebrand and grow inside a dense regional network.