Got my 3M Clear Bra installed!

TPC,

Cool!
Looks like vinyl wrap?
Guess not really like a normal front 'bra' protection that is
removable.

stt

 

I now understand the attraction.

After 25k miles I can report quite a few chips -- a half dozen or so that were visible when standing next to the car before dabbing them with a touch up pen.

Interestingly 100% of the chips were on the bumper piece, either at its front or the large corners.

With the Blizzard Pearl I also noticed quite a few scratches in the door handle cups. These don't go all the way through the paint but the extent of them kind of surprised me since no one with long nails drives the car. Might be worth thinking about.

 

Sounds like the set up of a ghost story

 

I had a 300ZX 1991 Pearl White new this never happen and that car was low . Toyota ask me in a survey about the scratch and chip. I told them that it was a lot in the front side of the car. What they will do i don't know .

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Do you or your spouse where rings? My passenger side door cup gets well scratched and pitted by my wife's rings.

 

Paint *does* chip easier these days. This is primarily due to the recent adoption of Low-VOC automotive paint in the industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_paint
tl,dr: VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) are good for paint but are bad for living things, such as us. Paint is mostly water-based these days.

How Waterborne Paint Is Changing the Auto Industry | SEMA
tl,dr: This stuff is different and requires adapting. Fewer, but thicker coats of paint are now used. Race cars use thin paint layers to save weight.

TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION GLOBAL WEBSITE | 75 Years of TOYOTA | Products, Technology | Materials
tl,dr: Toyota met it's low-VOC targets for their metallic base coat 10 years ago. They use a three-layer coating, twice-baked (potato) paint process. They also have a pretty cool scratch-resistant clear-coat process.

End result:
Auto paint in general and Toyota paint specifically is more brittle due to baking, and being a single layer instead of multiple layers. Think of a flat sheet of wood is vs. a flat sheet of plywood - the plywood is much more puncture-resistant than a single layer of wood.

Solution:
Add a clear, flexible, impact-absorbing layer over the top of the paint/clearcoat. This will help cushion the paint from a stone's impact, and if the impact is still strong enough to crack or deform the paint under it, the additional layer will also keep the paint chipped in place. Not exactly self-healing, but more like containing the damage and concealing/minimizing it. Which as experience with film wraps has shown, it does.

Conclusion:
Wrapping the forward-facing surfaces of your car is now practically mandatory, if you want the paint to last (by minimizing chips and scratches at least).