Sammy's Car Wash: How getting the family car clean has turned into a science.

Robert Giannone gushed about the long, black scrubbers, rubbing one between his thumb and index finger, before jumping onto a moving conveyor belt as a mist of soap and water floated in the air.

Giannone was exuberant about his Maple Shade car wash, enthusiastically serving as tour guide to 70and73.com and explaining his high-tech approach to rendering cars clean and shiny, and a business model designed for busy consumers who want to baby their rides.

It's not that the Moorestown resident and Riverside High School graduate grew up hanging out at car washes. The 48-year-old MBA banker runs a team of foreign exchange specialists at PNC Bank in Center City Philadelphia and was hunting for a personal investment. After research that included looking at different franchises, he chose the car wash business — opening his first one last year on Route 38 in Maple Shade.

Now he intends to open another Sammy's Express Car Wash — named in honor of his late father-in-law — on a narrow and long 1.7-acre lot on Route 70 in Marlton that's dear to the memories of many in South Jersey.

The now-vacant strip was home for 36 years to The G Boys garden and Christmas center, where children waited in line near lighted Christmas tree displays and animated holiday scenes to visit Santa Claus. G Boys closed in April 2012 and the buildings were demolished.

"It's just great to see that there's a use for this parcel," Evesham Township Council member Kenneth D'Andrea said at Tuesday night's meeting. Added member Patricia Hansen: "That's been an eyesore there since 2012. ...This is a perfect location for this car wash."

Council members voted 5-0 in favor of an ordinance for Sammy's Express Car Wash Marlton LLC to develop the business on the site, which has been named the G Boys Redevelopment Area. The council, seven years ago, decided the G Boys lot was an area in need of redevelopment, a legal designation that can come with tax breaks to encourage development. In this case, a Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) would replace normal property taxes.

"You can look at a car wash as just a car wash or you can look at it as a service business," Giannone said in a 70and73.com interview. Giannone said he studied the way Starbucks, Wawa and Chick-fil-A focused on the customer experience. "That's kind of what I tried to emulate in the car wash."

The entrepreneur now is near a deal on a site for a third car wash, this one in Mount Laurel. Each car wash is an investment of $5 million or more, he said. Giannone's fellow investors include his wife, Ivonne Ganem-Giannone, a dentist who formerly was on the faculty of the Temple University School of Dentistry. The other two investors are Mark Donohue of Moorestown and George Stemetzki, a former South Jersey resident who now lives in Central Jersey.

Giannone said the Maple Shade Sammy's was opened with the investors' capital and a Small Business Administration loan. He expects the same financing for the Route 70 car wash.

»WATCH: Sammy's scrubbing cars. YouTube video.

Years ago, the primary car wash customers were men, but now it's predominantly women, Giannone said, explaining the customer experience strategies he developed after driving around and trying out other car washes. "They don't want to drive into a dark box," he said of consumers today. Sammy's has glass walls and the inside is nearly as bright as the outside.

Consumers also were wary of traditional car wash conveyors, the ones where workers direct you to steer your front left wheel to a gripping roller-and-chain mechanism. Sammy's design — Giannone calls it a "less anxiety-prone process" — is built around a giant conveyor belt the car drives onto, with nothing hitting the wheels or tires.

The marketing pitch sells the service, but also emphasizes busy customers: "Clean, Shiny, Dry in Five Minutes Time."

While many breeze through the wash, some also pull to the side to use the free vacuum service that includes a high-pressure air hose to blow the water out of side mirrors and other hard-to-reach parts of the newly washed car. Some are fanatical about the look of their rides and spend a long time cleaning the inside, he said.

At times, the vacuum system sucks up cell phone charging cables or other valuables. A filtration system allows a worker to open the giant vacuum unit to retrieve the customer's possession without affecting others who are vacuuming, Giannone said.

Giannone said his car washes are environment-friendly, cutting down the amount of water used for a wash. The typical car requires about 100 gallons for a wash. Of that, 75 gallons are recycled through settling tanks and filters. Ultimately, only 19 gallons of wash water goes into the sewer — the remaining six gallons are carried off with the car, he explained.

Solar panels are planned for the rear of the Marlton site, according to the company's plan filed with the township.

Sensors and light beams in the car wash feed the data into computers to calculate the height and length of each vehicle and set the equipment for that specific vehicle. "It's a highly coordinated orchestra. Everything has to work right and play its part," Giannone said.

The basics

• Address: Existing car wash is at 491 Route 38 W, Maple Shade, just west of the Kings Highway intersection.
• Hours: 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily.
• Telephone: (856) 320-4993
• Website: sammyscw.com
• Facebook: facebook.com/Sammyscw