Hmmm, haven't seen those. The brush car wash was in Chile, and the cars got covered in dust (we were in the Atacama desert). My wife didn't see the brush damage the wiper, but we lost the wiper, and found it back at the car wash (Subara Legacy wagon).

My vehicle got washed by hand every day at work (execs apparently weren't allowed to have dusty cars). Since they used one bucket of water to wash and rinse an Expedition, I am pretty sure I didn't avoid any scratches that way.

We take so many things for granted in North America. I don't think we have any car washes that even recycle water here.

Required by law here now that commercial car washes recycle the water. Hopefully they have effective filter systems.

The environmentalist in me understands that completely. And, there are many places in North America with a lack of water. However, in Vancouver we don't even meter water for most users, and we spill all the extra over the three dams we have (on 3 separate rivers) for the city water supply.

I remember doing 24 hour witness tests on 18 large diesel generator sets (which were bound for Western Australia). We cooled the separate-circuit aftercoolers with heat exchangers connected to city water, dumping it at the outflow. The heat exhangers had about a 4" inlet on the raw water side. The customer's engineers (Australian) wondered how we could afford the water.

Australia is normally very dry and water supply is a big problem. Households have to pay for the water they get from the water authorities and things like washing your car or washing down hard surfaces (like driveways etc) are often illegal in some areas. There are often restrictions on watering your garden such as no sprinklers, only hand watering and then only at certain times during the day.
Mind you, in the last month, most of Eastern Australia has received some of the highest rainfalls on record so some areas have gone straight from drought to flood.

yeah I am glad I live in an area where we almost never see road salt, or even snow for that matter (except for today, we are getting "hammered" with the white stuff). But from 2007-late 2009 we had a pretty bad drought and there was no car washing...seeing OPs salt covered x makes me cringe.