This is a new car, and the best time to apply a ceramic coating is when the car is new, but on close inspection there are a few scratches.
Every car we coat with ceramic is polished, and obviously we charge less for new cars because there is less polishing to do. The prep work is a major chunk of the cost of having a ceramic paint protection, and it's essential that we get it right.
We inspected the car twice, once before washing and, as seen here, once after washing. This revealed some scratches which needed removal before the ceramic could be applied. We ended up doing a couple of small area paintwork corrections to the front and rear door, there was some hand polishing to do around the door handles, and the whole front wing was machine polished.
When we set out to polish a new car like this, we will go over the whole car with our two stage polishing system, which has very little cut to it. With paintwork correction and scratch removal, we may use a heavy compound, coarse buffing pads, we may even use sandpaper to cut back the clear-coat.
This BMW X3 was treated with Matrix Blue Ceramic Coating, which is a 3-year product.
Which Ceramic Coatings do professionals use?
Professionals use a number of different brands of ceramic coating, and yes, they are much different to the ones you can buy online or in the motor accessory shop. The companies that supply ceramic coatings tightly control who is allowed to apply them. They offer training and certification, ensuring that anyone who is an agent for their brand is fully equipped, fully qualified, has suitable skill, equipment and environment for applying them properly. They may also assign areas to these agents, so even if a detailer does qualify, it doesn't mean they can become an agent for a specific product because somebody might have already got that region.
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