So the day finally came. I am now more than happy that I wrapped the entire front of my car in Xpel. I parked in a normal parking spot in downtown Boston near a loading dock and two hours later came out to my front left bumper being scraped to sh*t. Looks like the Xpel protected the actual car/paint pretty well if not perfectly. Now what do I do? Do I have to peel off the entire panel of the wrap to make it look right again?
Luckily, there is a camera on the loading dock....so I will find out who is responsible.....
Wow, it looks awful yet you say the paint is intact inder the Expel! I'm pretty well just amazed.
I had Expel applied to the front of my pearl white S75D. I know it protects against rock chips but I had no idea that it would protect paint to the extent of your scrape.
I did just install a Blackvue 4k camera. I have the all glass roof, it is fairly easy to run all the wires and get it working, I'd encourage you to install one. With the all glass roof there is a gap between the glass roof and the trim so it is almost trivial to tuck the rear camera wire into that gap. I cannot speak to other Tesla roof designs. The camera is active when parked but the camera doesn't save the movie unless the car is bumped, then it is stored as a special event file on the memory card. I believe it saves before and after the bump so that should give excellent front camera 4K images and not make you reliant on local surveillance cameras. The rear camera resolution is less. Anyway I am new to the dashcam experience but it strikes me that such a device would have been enormously helpful to you here. I have the black interior, you really don't see the cameras from outside the car, the cameras get lost in the reflections from the glass. I can't speak to other interior colors. The vendor I used shipped a $35 battery voltage monitoring part that isn't necessary or desirable in the Tesla installation so I'd suggest Tesla owners not get that. They also suggested substituting a non Blackvue large capacity memory card. The memory card they shipped is not one of the ones suggested by people in this group so I'd probably not take them up on that suggestion either. My vendor is in Canada so it isn't worth trying to ship bits back. I'd suggest a vendor in the US if you can. I'm just using the minimal capacity Blackvue card that came with the cameras. If an event is recorded, it goes into a different place on the memory card than the routine recordings so shouldn't be overwritten by the routine files, so maybe the minimal card capacity is enough. I know I'm rambling here but it is all information that would have been helpful to me.
I'm happy your car is intact. Once you remove the wrap, would you post a picture of the underlying paint before anything else is done? I need to know whether I should be just be surprised, remain amazed, or progress to being totally flabbergasted.
Were I in your spot I might contact the Expel people and see if they'll replace that piece in exchange for using your pictures in their advertising. I cannot imagine a better ad for them.
Best,
David
