Why do you offer your own warranty on ceramic coatings?
Quick answer: Because we stand behind our own prep and application. Our warranty sits on top of the manufacturer's product warranty, not instead of it. It is recorded against your registration, it is transferable with the car, and if anything ever needs looking at, you bring the car straight back to us rather than chasing a brand or its UK agent. Manufacturer warranties still apply; ours just removes the paperwork and the middleman.
When you have a ceramic coating applied here, two things are protecting you. The first is the manufacturer's product warranty, which covers the coating chemistry itself. The second is our own installer warranty, which covers the part the manufacturer can't see: the preparation and the application. We add that second layer because, in practice, that is where almost everything goes right or wrong, and it is the part we control entirely.
The honest reason we keep it in-house is that it makes life simpler for everyone. A coating that has a problem comes back to the workshop that applied it regardless of whose name is on the bottle, so we may as well own the whole process from the start. You can still fill out the manufacturer's paperwork, scan the QR code, download the app and register your warranty with the brand if you want to; none of that is wasted. But you don't need any of it to come back to us. We have the car logged against its registration, and that is all we work from.
What the manufacturer warranty actually covers, and where the gaps are
Product warranties from coating brands cover the coating performing as described: gloss retention, chemical resistance, a stated durability window. They are real, and we don't want to talk them down. But they come with conditions, and the conditions are where customers get caught out. Most require the coating to have been applied by an accredited installer, registered within a set number of days, and maintained to a schedule that often includes the brand's own top-up products and sometimes annual inspections.
Miss a step on that list -- register late, use the wrong shampoo, skip the inspection -- and the warranty can lapse without you realising. We have also watched brands rebrand, get bought, change their UK agent, or quietly drop a product line. When that happens, a warranty tied to a specific product registration becomes awkward to claim against even when the coating is fine. None of that is sharp practice on the manufacturer's part; it is just how product warranties are structured. It does mean the paperwork can outlive the company's interest in it.
What our warranty adds on top
Our installer warranty covers our workmanship: that the paint was correctly decontaminated and corrected, that the surface was prepped and panel-wiped properly, and that the coating was laid down and cured the way it should be. That is the layer a brand can never warrant, because they weren't standing in the bay when it went on. It is also, frankly, the layer that matters most. A premium coating applied over poorly prepped paint will fail; a sensibly chosen coating applied over properly prepped paint generally won't.
Because it is our own warranty, we set the terms to be straightforward. There is no separate registration window to miss, no requirement that you buy our top-up products, and no third party to satisfy before we'll look at the car. If something doesn't look right, you call us and bring it in. We honour the manufacturer's warranty too, by the way, whether or not you ever filled the form in -- if it's a product fault, we'll deal with the manufacturer on your behalf rather than sending you off to do it yourself.
How long it runs, and what we ask of you
The length of our installer warranty tracks the coating you chose, because a single-layer entry coating and a multi-layer flagship are not the same proposition. A lighter coating might carry a couple of years; the heavier, multi-layer systems we apply to cars people intend to keep run considerably longer. We tell you the figure in writing when the job is booked, not buried in small print afterwards, so there is no ambiguity about what you are covered for and until when.
What we ask in return is light, and deliberately so. Wash the car sensibly: a two-bucket method or a trip to a proper hand wash, not an automated brush rollover that drags grit across the paint. Don't take a polishing machine or an abrasive compound to a coated panel, because that removes the coating we are standing behind. Deal with bird mess, tree sap and fuel splashes reasonably promptly rather than letting them etch in over weeks. That is genuinely the whole list. We do not require you to buy our shampoo, book paid annual inspections, or use a particular maintenance product to keep cover alive; the conditions that quietly void a lot of manufacturer warranties simply are not part of ours.
What happens when you actually need to make a claim
The process is short because we designed it to be. You call or email, tell us what you are seeing, and book the car in. When it arrives we pull up its record against the registration, so before the car is even on the ramp we already know which coating went on, how many layers, who applied it and on what date. There is no form for you to find, no proof of purchase to dig out, no warranty card to have kept in the glovebox for three years.
We then inspect the paint properly, usually under our workshop lighting and sometimes with a gloss or thickness reading, to establish what is actually happening. If it is our workmanship, we put it right at no cost to you: that can mean a localised re-prep and re-coat of the affected panel, or in a rare case a full strip and re-do. If the inspection points to a genuine product fault rather than application, we take that up with the manufacturer ourselves and manage the claim on your behalf. Either way you deal with one workshop, in one conversation, and the car does not leave until the paint is right.
Covered, or not: a few honest examples
It helps to be specific about where the line sits, because "warranty" can sound like it means "anything that ever happens to the paint." It does not, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of vague claim we warn customers about elsewhere.
Things we cover: the coating lifting, flaking or delaminating; high spots or hologramming that trace back to how we laid it down; patchy gloss or hazing caused by prep or cure rather than wear; contamination trapped under the coating because a panel was not decontaminated properly before we sealed it. In short, anything that is a consequence of our hands on the car.
Things we do not cover, and would explain plainly at the desk: stone chips and road rash, which are physical impact and not a coating failure; scratches and swirls put in afterwards by an automatic car wash or a careless sponge; etching from bird mess or sap that was left on the panel for weeks; accident damage, kerbing and panel resprays by a third party that sit on top of or replace the surface we coated. A coating is a sacrificial, protective layer; it is not body armour, and it will not stop a trolley in a supermarket car park. Being straight about that up front is part of why our claims record is what it is: customers know what the coating is for, so they are not disappointed by it failing to do something it was never meant to do.
A transferable warranty, and why that is unusual
Our warranty stays with the car, not with you. If you sell it, the coating stays covered until the warranty expires and the new owner inherits the benefit. They don't need to register, notify us, or prove anything; the car is already logged in our system against its registration, so when it turns up we can see exactly what was done and when.
That matters more than it first sounds. A transferable coating warranty is a genuine selling point when you come to move the car on, because it tells the next owner the paint was looked after by a workshop that is still standing behind the work. It is also consistent with how we handle the rest of our services, so customers who use us for more than one thing aren't trying to remember which job has which kind of cover. The one practical thing worth doing is mentioning it to the buyer and pointing them at us; we will pick the car up from its registration the moment it comes back through the door, but the new owner only benefits from cover they know exists.
Warranty, guarantee: not the same word
People use the two interchangeably, but they aren't the same thing, and the distinction is worth knowing. A warranty is specific: it promises a defined outcome for a defined period under defined conditions. A guarantee is broader and less prescriptive -- a general assurance that we'll put right work that isn't up to standard. Technically, what we offer is a guarantee, which is the wider of the two; the warranty language is just the form the coating world expects to see. The practical upshot for you is that we are committing to more, not less, than a narrow product warranty would.
The claim we are quietly proud of
Here is the part that tells you why we are comfortable backing our own work. In nearly 40 years of trading, we have never had a warranty claim on a coating we applied. Not one that was down to our prep or application.
What we have done is fix plenty of coatings under warranty -- but every one of those was a car a manufacturer called us in to troubleshoot, applied by someone else, where the brand wanted a workshop it trusted to put the job right. Tom, our operations manager, has lost count of the number of times a "failed coating" turned out to be a prep failure rather than a product failure: contamination trapped under the coating, a panel that was never properly corrected, edges that were missed. That experience is exactly why our own warranty leans so hard on the prep. We have seen, from the inside, what causes coatings to let go, and almost none of it is the chemistry in the bottle.
So when we put our own name on the warranty, it isn't a marketing flourish. It is a bet we have been making for three and a half decades and haven't lost yet.