Larry Kosilla Left Wall Street to Wash Cars. Now He's the Most-Watched Detailer in the Country.

Larry Kosilla spent one year on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange trading natural gas commodities before he walked away from it at 23. He had an economics degree from the University of Virginia and a Wall Street paycheck, and he traded both for a job as a car courier — driving exotics to film sets and photo shoots for a Greenwich Village outfit called Cooper Classics.

That courier job lasted about a year before Kosilla bought a car wash in Harrison, New York, and renamed it The New York Motor Club. He eventually sold it and moved into mobile detailing, building a client list that came to include Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus. In 2011, after roughly eighteen months developing his own formulas, he launched AMMO NYC — his own line of detailing chemicals, and the name that would become synonymous with paint correction on YouTube.

He started posting under his own channel in 2012 and also hosted three seasons of /DRIVE Clean on the /DRIVE YouTube channel, one of the first long-form series built entirely around detailing and paint correction rather than car reviews. AMMO NYC's own channel has grown to 2.31 million subscribers, and by most measures remains the largest educational car-care channel on the platform. In 2025, Discovery Channel picked up the format for television: Extreme Detailing, hosted by Kosilla, premiered August 5 and follows his team restoring neglected and forgotten cars — a barn-find DeLorean, a Lamborghini Miura that had sat in a living room for 40 years, a family's written-off Land Rover Discovery II — streaming alongside its Discovery broadcast run on HBO Max and Discovery+.

The project that still anchors his résumé happened well before the TV deal. In 2016, Kosilla's team spent 138 hours restoring a 1997 McLaren F1 GTR LT race car, work detailed enough that it won the Spirit of the Quail award at Monterey Car Week that year — a rare honor for a detailing job rather than a restoration shop's full mechanical rebuild.

Kosilla's stated philosophy, repeated across his own site and in interviews, boils down to a line he's used for years: "Your car's paint is like skin. It has pores like skin. It breathes like skin. It needs to be fed like skin." It's the same logic that's driven AMMO NYC's product line and its instructional videos alike — treating paint correction and protection as ongoing maintenance rather than a one-time fix, and treating the education around it as the actual product. In 2020, that approach got a permanent home: a dedicated studio in Danbury, Connecticut, built specifically to produce the detailing and how-to content the channel is built on.