Is ceramic coating worth it?

The honest version

Ceramic coating gets sold hard, so it is fair to be suspicious of anyone whose answer to “is it worth it” happens to be yes and who also sells it. Here is the version we give people in the studio.

It is worth it if you are going to look after the car. It is not worth it if you are not. That is genuinely the deciding factor, more than the car, more than the colour, more than the price you paid.

A coating is not a force field and it is not a substitute for washing. What it does is make the car far easier to keep clean and hold the finish for years instead of weeks. If you wash the car properly you get all of that. If you never wash it, you have bought gloss you will not see under the dirt, and you will be disappointed in year two.

What you are actually paying for

Two things drive the price, and people usually underestimate both.

The first is the coating itself. Crystal Serum Ultra is one of the hardest coatings available and it is priced like it. A cheaper quote very often means a cheaper coating, with less hardness and a shorter life, sold under the same word. Not everything marketed as ceramic behaves like Ultra does.

The second is the work that happens before any coating goes near the paint. Decontamination, then hours of machine polishing to take out the transport marks, wash marks and swirls that are already in a brand new car before you ever drive it. A coating seals the paint exactly as it is, so if the prep is skipped you are paying to lock in somebody else’s defects for the better part of a decade.

So when you compare two quotes and one is dramatically cheaper, you are usually looking at both at once: a cheaper product, and fewer hours before it went on.

Factory paint is thinner than it used to be

This is the argument that has actually changed over the last decade, and it is the reason coating a new car makes more sense now than it did.

Manufacturers have been making paintwork as thin as they can get away with. It is cheaper to produce and it is lighter. What it means for you is that there is less clear coat sitting between the world and your colour, and less margin to correct out of it later.

Every cut and polish removes a little clear coat. It is a finite resource and you do not get it back. Protecting thin factory paint from the start is a different proposition to protecting the thicker paint that came on cars twenty years ago, where you could correct your way out of most problems.

The wax comparison

The alternative to a coating is not nothing. It is wax or a sealant, reapplied every two to three weeks through an Australian summer to keep working.

Almost nobody does that. People do it for a month, then life happens, and the protection quietly stops existing while they assume it is still there. A coating removes that maintenance loop. You still wash the car, but you are not reapplying protection on a fortnightly cycle for years.

The insurance comparison

Most of us carry comprehensive insurance for the unlikely event of a crash. Almost nobody carries anything for the thing that is guaranteed to happen, which is the daily grind of UV, bird droppings, sap, road film and industrial fallout working on the paint every single day the car exists.

That is the actual argument for a coating. Not the shine. The shine is a bonus.

What it does for resale

Trying to sell a tired looking car is a stressful, expensive exercise. The usual path is shelling out for a pre-sale detail and correction to get the paintwork to something you can photograph, and that cost lands at the exact moment you are trying to get money out of the car, not put money into it.

Protecting it from day one means the car you are selling in five years still looks like a car somebody wanted. For most people the vehicle is the second most expensive thing they own after the house, and it is the only one that is guaranteed to lose value. Slowing that down has a number attached to it.

When it is not worth it

A coating rewards people who wash their car properly. It punishes people who do not, because the gap between what they were promised and what they see gets wider every month.

Maintaining it is not difficult. Wash it regularly, use the two bucket method, use decent products, get bird droppings and sap off within a day or two rather than letting them bake, and stay out of the automatic tunnel washers with their spinning brushes. That is the whole list.

If reading that list made you think you would not do any of it, a coating is not the right purchase for you and we would rather say so before you spend the money than after.

How to judge a shop before you book

If you decide it is worth it, the installer matters more than the brand on the bottle. Find a well reviewed local shop that specialises in coatings and new car protection rather than one that does it as a sideline, and then ask them two things.

Ask why they use the product they use. Anyone who has genuinely chosen a coating will have a real answer about hardness, chemistry and how it behaves over years. Anyone who cannot answer is using whatever their supplier pushes.

Ask what the prep involves and how long the car is with them. If the whole job is a few hours start to finish, no real prep is happening. On a new car the polishing itself is hours of machine work, and the car is normally with us for days rather than going back the same afternoon.

And ask whether the coating is registered with the manufacturer, because an unregistered coating has no warranty behind it regardless of what you were told on the phone.

For what it is worth, we install Gtechniq Crystal Serum Ultra as accredited installers, and a registered coating carries up to nine years of cover. If you want the detail on why that product rather than another, it is on our ceramic coating page.

If you are still deciding between a coating and paint protection film, that is a different question and we have answered it separately in PPF or ceramic coating.

A coating rewards people who wash the car properly. Here is exactly how to wash a coated or filmed car, and what to keep well away from it.