Why ceramic coatings are a Good value

As a lifelong car enthusiast, my journey into auto care and vehicle cleaning began early in life. From the start, my main questions were always the same: What products best protect my car’s paint? How do I keep it looking its best? And how do I clean in all those hard-to-reach cracks and crevices—though that’s a topic for another day. After a solid 25 years of experimenting with countless products, starting with my very first car, I can now say with confidence that the answer is ceramic coatings.

Why Ceramic Coatings Are the Best Choice

After trying just about every product available, I can confidently recommend ceramic coatings as the top choice for paint protection. While they may have a higher upfront cost, there are also plenty of DIY and sprayable ceramic options that offer decent protection compared to waxes and sealants. Although these alternatives don’t provide as much or as long-lasting protection as professional-grade ceramic coatings, they still do an excellent job of resisting chemicals and are highly hydrophobic (water-repellent).

Whether you choose to have a ceramic coating professionally installed, take the DIY route, or use a sprayable ceramic, it’s worth the investment if you care about your car’s paint. You won’t regret it.

Waxes and Sealants vs. Ceramic Coatings

So why is ceramic so good? While waxes and sealants can temporarily fill in imperfections, making the surface look smooth and glossy, they don’t provide much actual protection. They are more of a superficial solution. Waxes and sealants are not resistant to environmental degradation and offer little to no scratch resistance. In contrast, ceramic coatings are chemical resistant and semi-permanent.

Practically speaking, if you use harsh chemicals or even just a degreaser to clean your car, waxes will come off along with the contamination, forcing you to reapply them. Waxes are also not resistant to the acidity of bugs, which can lead to paint etching. Bug etching is one of the most common types of damage I encounter that standard detailing can’t fix. If left unchecked, bug acids can eat through the paint, sometimes requiring a full respray of the affected area.

The Benefits of Ceramic Coatings

Ceramic coatings are highly chemical-resistant, which means they can resist the harmful effects of substances like bug acids, road salt, and tree sap. They are also extremely hydrophobic, so water, bugs, and even ice slide off the surface easily. This not only makes the car easier to clean but also prevents contaminants from bonding with your clear coat. In fact, all of our maintenance customers have some form of ceramic applied, which allows us to work more efficiently while delivering a better final result.

When you think about the abuse cars take and how much they cost, it makes sense to protect them. While ceramic coatings can be expensive and time-consuming to apply, they are well worth it if you want your car to last, look its best, and retain its value.

UV Protection and Longevity

Another great benefit of ceramic coatings is their UV resistance. Clear coats, when unprotected, break down over time under the sun’s rays. As the clear coat heats and cools, it expands and contracts, trapping contaminants and pulling them into the paint. This can cause the clear coat to fade or crack, eventually requiring a repaint. Ceramic coatings, however, act as an impermeable barrier that protects the paint from UV rays and contamination.

While ceramic coatings do break down over time, they take the abuse instead of the paint. With proper care, a ceramic coating can last for years. In fact, we offer professional ceramic coatings with a 5-year warranty and even one with a lifetime warranty, provided we perform a yearly ceramic reboot. This service, typically priced at $100, involves applying a sprayable ceramic over the existing coating to refresh the protection and replace any damaged areas. Even if you go the DIY route, I recommend doing a reboot yourself. Our product, Skivvies, is ideal for this purpose.

Enhanced Gloss and Shine

Ceramic coatings also offer a level of gloss and shine that waxes and sealants simply can’t match. Our professional-grade ceramic coatings act like an extra layer of clear coat, giving the paint a deep, glossy, and wet look that really makes it pop. Depending on your car’s color, it can look even shinier than before the coating was applied.

To get the best results, especially with our professional ceramics, we perform paint correction before applying the coating. This process removes scratches, scuffs, and imperfections from the paint. While ceramic coatings don’t fill in imperfections like waxes and sealants, paint correction allows the ceramic to bond better to the surface and deliver the best possible appearance. We offer ceramic coatings without paint correction, but we don’t recommend it, as the final result won’t look as good, and warranties on our professional coatings require paint correction.

Drawbacks of Ceramic Coatings

As much as I love ceramic coatings, they do come with a few drawbacks. The first one is the cost. Ceramic coatings can be expensive, especially if you’re going for a professional-grade application. Another downside is that they don’t fill in imperfections like waxes or sealants do. In fact, they often require paint correction beforehand to get the best results. This adds to both the cost and the time commitment.

And while this isn’t exactly a drawback, there’s a lot of marketing hype around ceramic coatings that can be misleading, if not downright false. Yes, ceramic coatings are scratch-resistant, but they’re not scratch-proof. Also, while they make your car easier to clean and reduce how often you need to do it, you still have to clean your car. That brings me to another downside—you can’t drive through a traditional car wash. Even if it’s touchless, I still don’t recommend it. The one thing that can wear down ceramic is friction, just like your car’s clear coat. So if you want to get the most out of your ceramic coating, you’ll either need to wash your car yourself or have it professionally detailed. We offer several products to help make that easier for you.

Another thing to consider is that for maximum longevity, your car is best kept in a garage. That said, this is true for any car’s clear coat as well. With proper maintenance, we can usually get a full life or close to it, even on cars parked outside. For example, my own truck spends most of its time outdoors, and I’d much rather see the ceramic take the beating than the paint itself.

If none of that sounds like a big deal to you, then go ahead and disregard everything I just said. But if you’re still on the fence, the real deciding factor comes down to this…

Conclusion

If you care about how your car looks, want to keep it in the best condition possible, make it easier to clean (typically 10-20 minutes depending on the size), or you want to resist the elements to help your car last longer, then consider ceramic coatings.

If you’re on a budget but still want some benefits, try a sprayable ceramic, or ask us about our spray ceramic option. If you like to go the DIY route, there are plenty of pro-ish grade ceramics out there that are DIY-friendly. For a few hundred bucks—assuming you have zero equipment or product. With a little shade—you can do it yourself. And if nothing else, our ceramic-infused soap leaves a thin layer of ceramic that adds a little protection to your paint.

All in all, our business has mostly shifted away from using waxes. With the ever-evolving and improving chemical market, paint protection has never been easier. While waxes and sealants still have a place for things like filling minor imperfections or adding shine with less prep and work, we prefer to fix the issue with paint correction and then apply ceramic whenever possible. It’s just great stuff.

While having a pro-grade ceramic coating installed can be expensive, I believe there’s a certain value in it that makes it worth the investment. At RMR, our guiding principle is simple: we want cars to last as long as possible, we also place immense value on preservation and believe we should be taking care of our investments.

There’s a lot of talk about the future being greener, but not nearly enough about taking care of what we already have. How do we make our cars last as long as possible? For me, it’s personal—I love cars. I’m guilty of switching cars way too often, but I see myself as the custodian of these cool machines, and I want to take care of them so the next owner gets to enjoy a like-new car, even though it’s used.

Rich, that’s a little nuts, you might say. But that mentality is what drives RMR. We believe in being custodians of the world around us, and we hope to do our part in making it a little better by taking care of what we own. We love cars and we love taking care of our customers. So if you’ve been persuaded drop us a line or hope on Youtube to find out your DIY options!

Rich