Kirby64
Member
A pro coating would not be that much. Even the absolute top end stuff is only about $2,000 with many pro coatings running more in the $1000-$1500 range.
I'm doing my own using a product called Kamikaze Miyami. The car just had PPF put on the front and the shop that did it detailed it pretty well. I am borrowing a friend's long throw random orbital buffer and doing a very light polish on the paint and then doing the coating. I would say materials are more than $50. The Miyami coating is about $120 and other materials I will use are probably another $150. It's still a lot cheaper than paying $1350 I was quoted for a pro coating.
When you seal the car with ceramic coating you are putting something similar but higher tech to pottery glaze on it. Whatever the paint looks like when you seal it is what you are going to have until the coating wears off or you sand it off.
For the majority of consumers it's "more trouble than it's worth".... but if you are the kind of person who washes your cars by hand and would wax them anyway then it keeps the paint looking much better with less maintenance.
If you are the kind of person who runs your car through the filthy $10 auto car wash at the gas station every month and doesn't give a crap about swirls and scratches than ceramic is not for you.
"not worth it" is relative. Some people want their car to look sharp and are willing to spend more to get there and other people just don't really care as long as the car is clean.
I never knew what PPF was or cared about it until I moved to a state where they use sand and gravel in addition to magnesium chloride to handle road ice. Cars here get, quite literally, sand-blasted from this crap and I've seen 2-3 year old cars where the front end is chewed to hell from just doing highway commutes.
Totally agree that ceramic coating can be worthwhile if you do the DIY stuff. Only problem with it is that it requires a pretty pristine area to do prep work and curing. Unfortunately I don't have a dedicated garage, so that's a nonstarter for me.
Realistically though, the actual cost of DIY coating is going to be closer to $250-350, since most folks don't already own an orbital polisher. I guess you could take a swing at it without doing any paint correction and just claybarring/IPA, but that just seems like asking for trouble to me.