Cowboy State Daily’s editor Jimmy Orr sent me a video of a Bentley representative spray painting and blowing fire onto a car hood and then wiping it off as if nothing had happened. All while a Bentley General Manager looked on with sweat on his brow.
There are few things as expensive as the paint on a Bentley. Many of them have a paint cost that is equal to the average price of a car for the rest of us.
When you’re talking about that kind of money, there’s a certain expectation. That paint is a premium-level mixture applied in careful coats. And smart Bentley buyers won’t balk at spending even more to add Bentley’s proprietary Paint Protection Film on top of that.
Available only from the factory, this protective PPF is a special polymer made to heal itself. In the demonstration video, the fire to “burn” the spraypaint into the surface is key.
That fire actually activates the PPF’s healing properties. And then, with a squirt of cleaning and buffing compound, the black spray paint just wipes off leaving nothing but the shiny original Bentley paint behind.
A few years ago, Nissan showed a similar clear coat protectant on the then new-generation Leaf electric car. That “self-cleaning” protective paint covering wasn’t proof against dings and scratches as the Bentley PPF is, but it was liquid-proof.
So paint, dirty rain, and other things wouldn’t “stick,” thus leaving the color clean and pure. Nissan showed this off by staging a painter on a ladder accidentally tipping a bucket of paint onto the car. Now, a decade later, that prank video Nissan made is about all that remains of the miracle paint.
Paint clear protectants that are similar to that technology are entering the marketplace now, but are expensive compared to standard paints used in most automotive manufacture.
Today’s paints are formulated to go on in quick coats and dry in an “oven room” before being clear coated and sent to the dealership. Formulas are more environmentally friendly, faster drying, and stickier (to adhere to varied types of vehicle surfaces). This paint coating adds another step.
In short, adding these coats of paint protection is costly. It’s a matter of scale. If the process adds just three minutes to the overall production time and costs an extra dollar in materials, it’s adding a couple of thousand dollars to the cost of making the car. Think about the scale.
Adding a dollar to a run of 100,000 vehicles isn’t much. But adding that extra three minutes means more labor cost, more production time per unit, and fewer vehicles produced per shift and per day.
Subtract one car from production for the day to make up for the adding of three minutes to all of the others produced, and you’ve lost the income from that extra car.
Or add the overtime required for a factory full of workers so that the extra car can be produced and, agin, you’ve lost a lot of income. Hence the total cost running into the thousands per car. Fewer cars produced equals a higher cost per car that is produced.
And so, those of us not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a car don’t get magic paint protection films.
The good news? That “trickle down” thing that economists like to argue over when it comes to taxes is actually a real thing in automotive.
The expensive, exclusive, high-cost things that are only found on uber-lux and luxury cars eventually find their way into everyday cars for the rest of us.
Items like cruise control, power windows, heated and cooled seating, and so forth were all once only found in luxury models.
Today even the lowest-priced car probably has most of them as standard equipment. It takes a while, but the automotive trickle down is a thing.
So we’ll have magic paint protectant for normal folk someday.
And there’ll be some other new doo-dad technology only available to the one percent that us in the Walmart set can wow over.
Aaron Turpen can be reached at: TurpenAaron@gmail.com
Aaron is an accredited automotive journalist with over a decade of writing about cars, trucks, and more. His background includes automotive repair, commercial trucking, off-road expertise, and technology.
