Just found another paint chip on my baby. I swear that the paint on my Crossfire is paper thin. I don't know what I was expecting, but the spots where the primer is now showing make it appear that Chrysler applied a very thin layer of paint and clearcoat. Perhaps I am too sensitive to this issue as my previous car was a plastic Saturn. At this rate my Red Coupe is going to be primer grey in no time.

 

As the story goes, auto paint was reformulated to meet more stringent environmental standards. This reformulated paint is not as durable. All new cars have this problem. On the bright side, if or when I ever get my car repainted in blaze red, I'll have it done in enamel.

 

yeah i got alot of paint chips on my car as well.

 

Same, I now have a poke-a-dot crossfire...

 

~ a clear bra is a must on this car imo...

 

I have clear bra on mine, but I just found a "raw" area underneath the rear bumper right behind the rear tires.

I'm going to end up taping the area up for now with a black tape to prevent more rock rash. At least it's in an area that no-one can see.

 

Thanks for all the replies. I guess that I'll keep touching up my paint and hope that the polka dot look comes back into style.

 

We see so many different cars coming through our garage here at Meguiar's and they all get rock chips in the front, regardless of year or make. My '99 Miata was terrible for this, but my '04 PT Cruiser isn't bad at all. So much has to do with exposure; how much time do you spend on the freeway where there's a lot of truck traffic, how much is on rural roads with gravel shoulders where material gets kicked up onto the pavement, etc. I've taken dozens of measurements of my paint with a coatings thickness guage and it's right around 4.5 mils of total film build (primer, base, clear) which is certainly within industry average.

I can't really say that the paint on my Crossfire is any more or less chip sensitive than any other car, but there's no doubt that from a defect correction perspective the paint is damn hard. But there is a huge difference between "easy to correct" and "easy to scratch."

 

Mike, please help me understand this. You would think that if the clear-coat is hard to remove scratches, that it would also be hard to scratch.

 

I have to confess that what I originally thought was a paint chip on the side of my car turned out to be some asphalt that got kicked up from all of the road construction occuring in Ohio right now. And I will be the first to admit that the 18 mile stretch of I-271 that I travel up and down every day is a windshield killer. The Saturn to which I referred to in my original post looks like it was the target at a shooting gallery. And it too has chips on the hood.

It just pains me each time I wash and wax the car to see the new damage. But if I weigh that against the fun of driving the car and the looks that I get from passing motorists, I guess that I can put up with a few imperfections in an otherwise flawless automobile.

 

Yes, it seems like an oxymoron but quite often we do see paint that behaves this way. Probably the most glaring case is the C6 Corvette. It's very easy to inflict fine swirls into Corvette paint but polishing them out is exceptionally difficult. The physical mechanisms of scratching paint and levelling paint are very different.

About the only analogy I can think of is comparing a stick of butter to a piece of steak. Using a sharp knife put a shallow cut into the stick of butter. There's your "scratch" - easy enough. Now do the same to the steak. Not a whole lot more difficult, really. Now let's remove these two scratches by levelling the surface. Drag you knife across the top of the stick of butter, removing a shallow layer of material. Continue doing this until you've levelled enough material that the scratch/cut is no longer visible. Not hard at all, huh? Now try that with the steak. Can't do it, can you?

It's the difference between slicing into a surface compared to abrading it away. My Miata would scratch rediculously easily but it also polished out with ease. My PT Cruiser doesn't really scratch easily at all, but when it does the defects are very easy to eliminate. A Corvette will scratch easily but be a ***** to correct.

 

~ i had the product down the entire rocker panel, just behind the front tires, in front of the rear tires, and two pieces behind the rear tires...

invinca-shield sold it as a pre-cut set but they are no longer in business...

 

And you could hardly tell it was there unless you were 3' away and knew it was there... good stuff.

If I had know stuff like that existed I could of saved my side skirts... I'm real glad I did the headlights with this film as countless times they've paid for them self's.