About 17 years with Pelican
Van T. Le
Seventeen years is better measured in cars than in years. It is long enough to have washed three or four vehicles for the same household.
Seventeen years at 31425
Van has been part of the team for around seventeen years, long enough to have served the same customers through several vehicles each.
No job title is printed here or placed in the page's structured data, because none has been confirmed. Length of service has been, so that is what this page is about.
Seventeen years, converted into cars
Years are an abstract way to describe this. The useful unit is vehicles. Most people keep a car the better part of a decade, so seventeen years on the same forecourt covers two full ownership cycles for a regular customer and three for anyone who changes cars more often than that.
That is what "served the same customers through several vehicles each" actually means. It is not a figure of speech. It describes somebody who was here for the sedan, then the crossover that replaced it, and is still here for whatever replaced that.
What changed in cars across that window
Seventeen years covers a specific and quite eventful stretch. At the start of it, keyless entry was still a feature you paid extra for, reversing cameras were rare, and almost nothing on the outside of a car needed to be avoided by a brush. Today a mid-range vehicle carries sensors in both bumpers, cameras in the mirrors and the tailgate, and often a radar unit behind the grille badge.
Paint changed too. Water-based finishes with softer clear coats became the industry norm across exactly this period. They are better for the environment and less forgiving of careless handling, which is a real working difference rather than an abstract one.
And the fleet itself got taller and heavier. The proportion of pickups and crossovers on US 19 is not what it was in the late two thousands, and a taller vehicle behaves differently through a wash and takes longer to dry properly.
Seventeen Florida summers
The other thing a long tenure on this particular coast accumulates is a sense of what the climate does to vehicles. Palm Harbor sits between the Gulf and Old Tampa Bay, salt aerosol carries inland on the wind, and the humidity supplies the moisture that makes it corrosive.
Seventeen years of that is seventeen summers of watching which cars come back looking tired and which do not. The reasoning behind it is set out in salt air and your car, which is the guide version of what long-serving staff here already know from having watched it happen.
Elsewhere on the site
The two longest-serving members of the team are Jose Rodriguez Jr. and Moe Akhavan, both past twenty five years. The team page lists all three, and about Pelican covers the business itself instead of the people in it.
Bring it to 31425
31425 US Highway 19 N, Palm Harbor, FL 34684.