Well, you can't lump all "Chrysler paint" together. The Crossfire is the only Chrysler branded product built in the Karmann factory, and the only Chrysler product built in Europe for sale in the US. The paint is likely to be totally different than paint used in Chrysler plants in the US, Canada and Mexico. My PT Cruiser was build in Mexico, as are all PTs for North American consumption (Euro PTs were built in Austria) and after 6 1/2 years it is almost chip free on the front end. Surprisingly, that PT has some of the nicest factory paint I've ever worked on.

Heck, you can't even say that the paint on a 2004 Crossfire is the same as that used on any other model year as factories make small adjustments to outright sweeping changes all the time. I've seen PTs with horrid factory paint, for example. And we know, for example, that Rolls Royce just changed their paint within the last several months and it is now so incredibly hard as to be almost unworkable.

But there is a huge difference between chip resistance, scratch resistance, and workability. Stone chips direct impacts, scratches are fine cuts, and polishing is a slow leveling of the paint. A paint can be prone to one and resistant to another at the same time.

Frankly, I don't find the paint on the Crossfire (at least the ones I've worked on) to be any better or worse than anything else on the road, just different. But then, they're all different. And I've had the opportunity to work on a pretty wide range of cars!