"Car Wash" is a 1976 number-one popular and soul music single album by Rose Royce for MCA Records, the group's debut single album and one of the most notable successes of the disco era. Written and produced by the band's main producer Norman Whitfield, "Car Wash", the theme of the 1976 film Car Wash, was Rose Royce's most successful hit single. "Car Wash" also peaked at number three on the disco charts. The song was later covered in 2004 by Christina Aguilera and Missy Elliott, who released their version as the single for the Shark Talesoundtrack.

Norman Whitfield, a former producer for Motown Records, had been commissioned to record the soundtrack album for Car Washby director Michael Schultz. Although Whitfield did not want to assume the project, he did so because of both financial incentives and the chance to give Rose Royce, a disco/funk backing band who Whitfield signed to his own label in 1975, to get the exposure they needed to become mainstream. Unable to develop a theme song for the film, inspiration finally struck Whitfield while playing a game of basketball, and he allegedly wrote his first draft of "Car Wash" on a paper bag from a fried chicken eatery.

The resulting song set the mood and tone for the blaxploitation comedy film it was commissioned for. Rose Royce lead singer Rose Norwalt(Gwen Dickey), with brief assistance from guitarist Kenji Brown, describes a fun and easy-going car washing business, where everything is "always cool/and the boss don't mind sometimes if you act a fool."

Car Wash'ssoundtrack, a double album, was Rose Royce's debut LP, and the title track was their debut single. "Car Wash" sold two million copies, and was a number one success on both the Billboard popular and R&B charts in the United States and a top ten success in the United Kingdom. The song held the number-one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for one week, from January 22, 1977 to January 29, replacing "I Wish" by Stevie Wonder, and replaced by "Torn Between Two Lovers" by Mary MacGregor. The Car Washsoundtrack album, entirely recorded by Rose Royce and Whitfield, spawned two more successful singles: "I Wanna Get Next to You" and "I'm Going Down" (later covered in 1994 by Mary J. Blige).

The original Rose Royce version of "Car Wash" is one of the most sampled songs in history, not for its main instrumentation, but for its introductory section. The song opens with a series of hand claps, which have been sampled many times for both hip hop and R&B songs from the 1980s on. It was also re-released as a double A-side single with "Is It Love You're After?" in 1988 in the UK, peaking at #20.

In 2004, pop singer Christina Aguilera and rapper/singer Missy Elliott recorded a cover version of "Car Wash", giving the disco song a more modern pop feel and adding rapped verses from Elliott. In an interview Aguilera said, "...we had to change the key to be a little bit higher for my range. So we couldn't take the exact samples, but we brought in all these live instruments to recreate kind of this old, old classic, soulful feel and sound...."

"Car Wash" was the only single from the soundtrack to DreamWorks' computer animated film Shark Tale. Their version was supported with a music video, featuring Aguilera and Elliott as animated fish similar to those in the film. Aguilera and Elliott's cover of "Car Wash" missed the U.S. Billboard Top 40, peaking at number sixty-three, while becoming a top five hit in the United Kingdom and became the 48th best selling single in the United Kingdom of 2004 with sales of over 100,000 copies, despite only being released in late November.

In this context, the "car wash" the song refers to would be the place where Oscar (the main protagonist, voiced by Will Smith) works, where large sea animals who behave like cars are washed in the same manner.

The music video to Christina's version was directed by Rich Newey.