Airdrie Detailer Spills 8 Secrets: Why Ceramic Coatings are the BEST Investment You Can Make
- excelfinishes
- Aug 28, 2020
- 6 min read
Curb Appeal.
First Impressions.
Sex Appeal even!
The better something looks, the more value it has. Not only to the owner, but to prospective buyers (definitely don’t read too much into the “Sex Appeal” line here…). It’s a basic human psychology.
Ceramic Coatings make your car look good, and keep it looking good. Period. The ways they do this are numerous. But if that’s all the time you have to read, then feel free to skip the rest of this article!
I’m assuming those reading this right now actually care about maintaining their things. I care about my things too. I always have! It’s one of the reasons I enjoy detailing. Regular mechanical maintenance is one of the best things I can recommend. But what about the equally important visual maintenance?
You might ask, “But I wash it? That’s good enough.”
Hmm... it’s good. It’s more than some people do (believe me), but it’s not enough. Especially with a high-end vehicle. So here are 8 reasons why Ceramic Coatings are the best investment you can make.
1. Ceramic Coatings Reduce Road Grime on your Vehicle
Washing a vehicle is great, but what the average person doesn’t understand is that road grime and other things slowly build up on the surface of the paint. Unless you’re giving your vehicle a full decontamination wash (a 3-5 hour process) a couple of times a year, you have road grime on your paint. That drastically reduces the shine and gloss we crave when we look at a new car. You often don’t know you have road grime because it builds up over time. Kind of like slowly gaining weight (stupid Covid 15...). You may not notice it, but others will! Coatings help reduce road grime on your vehicle.
2. Coated Cars Are Easier to Clean
I won’t bore you with many details here. This fact is alluded to in many other ways in this article. But when dirt has a harder time sticking to paint, it also comes off easier. This makes it especially desirable for Albertans. We have incredibly strict washing by-laws in this province – you can’t use soap on your vehicle when washing in on your residential property in most cities. But with a Ceramic Coating you can do a basic rinse and often see better results than you could by using soap on an un-coated car.
3. The Gloss and Appearance of Coated Cars is Off the Charts
SiO2 is a large ingredient in Ceramic Coatings. It is also a major component of glass. In fact, you can think of these coatings as liquid glass. This is why they are sometimes referred to as Glass Coatings. They go on as liquid, and harden into a glass like surface. That means that the appearance you get from them is like nothing else. It’s a long-term wax… on steroids!
4. They Protect from Scratches... Sort of...
Listen, if you’re thinking about getting a Ceramic Coating, or even talking about one with a professional detailer, and they are promising major scratch protection, RUN. They are either lying to you, or don’t have the experience to know the truth. The scratches I’m taking about here are the "swirls" that typically get introduced during washing. Ceramic Coatings are harder than your natural clear coat. This does NOT mean that the oblivious millennial talking on their phone while walking through a parking lot with their purse hanging by their side is not going to scratch your vehicle. They will. Ceramic Coating or not, deeper scratches are still going to happen. However, as intended, the coating will take most of the damage. They are intended to be a sacrificial layer. Check out the video above for more information on this. Do Ceramic Coatings live up to the hype that you might read about and see in marketing campaigns? No. Are they the best thing currently out there and still pretty amazing none the less? Absofreakinglutely.
5. UV Protection and Paint Fade!
If you’re an old school lover of cars, you might have noticed that newer vehicles seem to scratch easier than before. They definitely do. Older vehicles used to have a type of lacquer as a top layer. Even though it scratched less, this lacquer type clear coat had many drawbacks. Mainly, UV protection. It had none. Modern day clear coats have more in common with plastic than with lacquer. This gives many benefits, including UV protection. BUT, they do scratch easier. I LOVE my Japanese vehicles, but these makes are by far the worst for skimping on clear coat. We should get around 4 millimeters of clear coat on paint as a minimum. Many Japanese models have less than 2! If you’ve got a German or domestic model, don’t think you’re in the clear though (pun intended…). For years, all car manufactures have been giving us less and less clear coat to protect our vehicle’s paint jobs, even high-end German and Italian models. That means that faded paint is again something that we have to be on guard for. Ceramic Coats are specifically formulated to have tons of UV protection. It’s a multi year sunscreen.
6. Increased Protection Layers
Again, this is touched on in other points, but because our clear coats are getting thinner and thinner, the more layered protection we have on our vehicles the better. Where once we wouldn’t be as worried, knowing we had plenty of clear coat to work with if we needed to polish out imperfections, we can’t be so casual about it now. Bird droppings, water spots, road chemicals, corrosion, etc. etc. etc. These things permanently diminish our clear coat. Why wouldn’t you want multiple layers of protection on top?
7. Corrosion and Rust!
This is the biggest one for me. Alberta uses rocks on their roads during the winter. Lots of them. With rocks comes rock chips. If you are a person who stays on top of these chips, that’s a great start! But when you’re talking Alberta roads, it’s often impossible to get all of them. Water finds these chips and water on exposed sheet metal is the start of car cancer - rust. Ceramic Coats seal those rock chips, stopping moisture from starting the rusting process. You might be thinking, “Well that’s cool, but this is just my summer fun car. I keep it clean and don’t drive it in winter.” All the more reason to coat your vehicle! I have lost track of the number of customers who drive exotics, and have come to me after it’s too late to stop the progressing corrosion. Alberta also uses a lot of salt, as well as other chemicals to keep our roads clean in the winter. This stuff doesn’t just wash off the road in the spring rains. Any amount of moisture on the roads in the summer is going to contain an element of these chemicals, making that water even more corrosive to sheet metal. Summer time cruiser or daily driver, this is one of the biggest reasons why Ceramic Coatings protect your investment like nothing else.
8. They Last a REALLY Long Time
But again, if you have a shop or a detailer who’s promising anything over 5 years, I would be extremely hesitant to go with them. A lot of coatings will market themselves as a 10 year, or even life long coating. I have used some of them. But in all reality, while they might still be on your vehicle 10 years from now, they are likely not doing anything effective after 5. If your vehicle is driven in Canadian winters, you may get even less time. The salts and chemicals we use on our roads are pretty harsh. They degrade the life of Ceramic Coatings. I am going to refer to Esoteric again - they explain this better than I could. But the fact that coatings only last 1-5 years depending on which type you go with is the reason why I try to price my coatings with the best value. I understand that they don’t last forever, but that they are still an incredibly important thing to do to your vehicle.
9. Bonus Talking Point!!: The Future - Graphene Coatings.
The science is solid. Graphene Coatings have the potential to have even better visual appeal than Ceramic Coatings, protect for longer, and cure even harder than ceramics. While the science is solid, the products are still new. I am eagerly watching the real-world results of Graphene Coatings. If they prove to match the hype, then I am going to be extremely pumped! Here's one of my favorite Canadian detailers giving his review of one such coating.
Conclusion
So there you have it. These are reasons why Ceramic Coatings are the best investment you can make in your Vehicle. For myself, it all comes back to the psychological. We’re funny creatures as humans. Not only are we happy to spend more on things that look better, but we also enjoy our own possessions more when they look better. AND, other people tend to envy our things when they look nice. Visual appeal adds a crazy amount of value to any number of things, especially cars.
Ceramic Coatings are one of the best investments you can make that ends up paying dividends over the life of the vehicle.
If you have questions that weren’t answered here, or want to get some pricing on coatings, I am only an email away!
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