Have factory paint jobs gotten worse or better?

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Originally Posted By: dparm


Orange peel is actually a good way for me to tell that the car probably has the original paint. Body shop paint jobs are often too perfect.


Very true. A good shop will almost always lay down a thicker coating than factory. And savvy car brokers know this too, and can measure the differences in paint thickness to detect collision work, which is never good for value.
 
Originally Posted By: eljefino
. . . and some real junkers like the "Ford Escort Pony" came with dull paint as well.


My wife bought a new '88 1/2 Escort Pony, in red. She loved it. The paint was not dull, but we kept it polished. Admittedly, it did not have a lot of power and was a little crude. But it never broke down and was the only car we ever sold where we got back a thank you card.
 
My Toyota's have junk paint, chip easily. At least the undercoating/galvanizing isn't bad. My Jetta had better paint but it too got chipped. IMO unless if you garage it the vehicle is consumer item, expect the paint to go bad eventually. The paint is just one more thing to go wrong, like any of the mechanicals.
 
I am not a huge fan of the two stage paints. Most of the time when you see a paint job going bad it is because the clearcoat starts peeling off. At least on the old single stage paints, you could buff it back to a shine in most cases.
 
I was used to V6 or turbo FWD cars from the 80s getting very little of life from the hood paint. Were the auto makers much less careful about underhood temperatures back then, or is the newer paint that much more resistant to heat?

I think maybe the former is true, as those kinds of 80s cars were unreliable when compared to the nearest RWD car, the 80s Nissan Maximas are an excellent exapmle of this.
 
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