Top 4 Myths About Ceramic Coatings From A Professional Car Detailer

There are some coating companies out there that have an as seen on TV type of marketing campaign, that can leave consumers with a warped sense of what a coating actually is and it's limitation. In this post i'm going to explain what a coating is and, more importantly, what a coating is not.

My goal with this post is to provide you with the information so you can have a realistic expectations on what a ceramic coating is and how it performs. It'll equip you with the right information so you can make a good decision on when choosing a coating for your car.

#1: I'm not going to have to wash my car, right? After one of the very first coatings that we did, a customer very calmly and seriously asked us, "Is it true I never have to wash my car again?". It definitely caught me off guard. Coatings definitely make the car much easier to wash and the vehicle is certainly going to stay cleaner for longer. But your car is still going to get dirty, even with a coating on it.

#2: Coatings are permanent. If you do enough research into ceramic coatings, you're going to find information that'll tell you that coating will form a permanent bond to the clear coat. My problem with this one is the word permanent. It leads you to believe that once you have this coating on your vehicle that it's going to be there forever. This is simply just not true.

If you want, you can think about it like this. You can put a wax on a car, leave it for five years in a climate control garage, put a bubble around. When you come back, the wax is still going to be on that surface after five years. Technically you can say it lasted for five years. In reality, washing the car, the sun, the salt, the dirt, all the environmental fallout are consistently breaking down the vehicle's protection. Nothing is permanent. The paint under the coating is not permanent and everything on this earth has a life expectancy and will break down with time.

Have a closer look at their warranties also. They are riddled with holes and fine print that include a number of things that'll void your warranty.

#3: Coatings will peel off when they start to fail. A coating forms a thin, incredibly strong bond on the top of your clear coat. People think that when it fails, it's going to fail like a clear coat separating from the base coat. When a coating fails, just like when wax fails, you're not going to see it peeling off. It's simply just wears away and you're only going to see that the beading and the dirt shedding qualities are poor. There's also no worry if you get a stone chip. There's no risk of the entire coating being compromised.

#4: Coatings are scratch proof. This is the biggest myth in ceramic coatings. If you get a coating on your vehicle, you won't have to worry about scratches anymore. You will see a lot of this on ceramic coating website that their product is scratch resistant. Please don't confuse this with scratch proof. Now, detailers and consumers will often see scratches differently. I see it on a daily basis where a customer will believe that their paint is scratch free. They may be looking at it in the garage or perhaps they're looking in a shaded area. But oftentimes you won't see the true condition of your vehicle's paint unless you're in direct sunlight or you have an inspection light.

Deep scratches are easy to see whether you're in the shade or not. But the smaller scratches that you can see in direct sunlight are usually called swirl marks. The very small scratches in your paint that you see will form a spiderweb like pattern and dull the reflected light coming off the surface. These fine scratches appear anytime you touch the vehicle's paint. Improper washing, dirty towels, brushes, dirt or salt getting trapped in between the towels or mitts, touch a dirty car, brushing the paint as you walk by. There's hundreds of ways the vehicle could develop swirl marks.

Ceramic coatings offer hard protection and they will have prevent some of this marring and swirls. But ceramic coatings and are not scratch proof. It only takes one bad wash to put small scratches into your vehicle's coating. Proper maintenance and good washing techniques are vital to keeping your coating in good condition.

Fortunately, the coating offers a sacrificial layer that can be removed and reapplied as necessary to protect the original paint below it.

If you would like to have your car professional detailed and ceramic coated please reach out to Jimbo, JimbosDetailing.com