F250to911

I guess your experience is different than mine but I stand by my original post and I am talking about modern ppf not 20 years ago. For me ceramic coating works best. It makes it easy to clean car and looks great. If after a year I get a few rock hits I just buff them out. But when I have ppf the dings all have to stay because you can't buff ppf. So it looks like hell after a few years and has to either be removed or replaced.

rasetsu

Yes, my experience is dramatically different from yours. Most of the stone strikes I've gotten disappear from the PPF after being exposed to direct sun for a bit or warmed up with a hair dryer. I have not had any strike that has actually gone through the film and the installer I selected rolls all the edges under the panels so the installation is nearly invisible. No dirty edges anywhere. I have PPF on two cars 5+ years and counting each without needing to replace it yet. On one car, I did have the PPF removed and replaced after a year but only because I screwed up and chose a poor installer who did a lousy job. Aside from one small scuff on the nose that resulted from a sheet of particle board that was launched into the air from the car in front me and smacking the front of my car dead center, the film looks just as good as new. The skill level of the installer can make or break how PPF looks.

Yes, ceramic also works great by making the car super easy to clean and keeps it shiny for a very long time which is a completely different function than PPF.

Ray K.

My recent PPF experience with XPEL is the same as F250to911. Both cars had penetrations within a year. My M4 on the front of the hood. My 911 on the hip. The penetration on the M4 definitely chipped the paint. I'm not advocating against PPF, but depending on your driving style, roads and luck, it's not going to stop everything. Fortunately, both cars are plain white, so easy enough to touch up. I'll see what my installer recommends for the 911 when I take it for the spring detail. Maybe they will get a warranty replacement of the PPF. That 10mil product Honza got looks interesting as it's thicker and has the ceramic properties built in.

GTSGO!

Not sure if anyone follows OC Detailing on YouTube or Instagram, but their post on PPF fails are terrifying!. Their recent post on the AMG is just crazy and make me hesitate on PPF…

double-o-seven

Personally, I wouldn't bother with PPF for three reasons:

1. Most people trade in or sell their cars within 5 years of purchase. Dealers will not pay you any significant premium for PPF'ed cars. They have a lot of reasons to denigrate the condition of the PPF, because any imperfect PPF looks ugly anyway, and you'd be lucky to get 20~30 percent of original PPF cost back. Even that's an optimistic estimate.
2. If you ever have rock / sharp object penetrations into PPF, let alone any minor scrapes or accidents, it will look super ugly. To fix them, you will mostly have to spend new thousands of dollars to "re-wrap" the sections of the car. A boon for the wrap shop, and a terrible deal for the customer. In contrast, a non-PPF'ed car can often resort to cheap compound buffing and waxing to fix most of the superficial paint damage. Of course, you could peel the entire PPF off, but then you just wasted all of the original installation money that went into the PPF.
3. This point is often not talked about, but PPF is very installer-sensitive. Even a seasoned installer can feel tired at one moment and accidently "blade" your car and permanently damage your car paint, with a deep blade cut. For not-so-seasoned installers, multiple blade marks, sometimes tens and even hundreds of blade marks on the paint surface, are very common. Imagine paying a cool ten grand for the PPF job, only to get your brand new 911 bladed underneath the PPF. The worst part of that is that you WILL NOT know that your car is bladed until the car's PPF is peeled off years later.

In summary, I think thick and multi-layered ceramic coat applications are not only cheaper, but more practical than PPFs in most use cases. A good multi-layered ceramic coat application will cost three grand or less, and provide you with sufficient protection.

double-o-seven

I have personally utilized OC Detailing before in the Bay Area. Its blogs sometimes show how its competitors are blading their customers' cars for botched PPF jobs.

Unfortunately for OC Detailing, I'm not totally satisfied with its window tinting and ceramic coating service quality on one of my cars. I am quite sure some of its workers accidentally broke interior trim pieces while installing the window tint films, and I only discovered it months later.

Wilder

All these mental gymnastics by PPF armchair experts.... lol

There are only two deciding factors:
1) how/where will you drive your car, and
2) how much do you care about rock chips and road abrasion

Anyone who has owned any vintage 911 for at least a year or two knows the design of the 911 inherently attracts rock chips like a magnet.
You won't escape it unless you're just driving your car to C&C on Sunday.
The more you drive these cars as intended, the more rock chips you will get. It's not a question of if. It's a question of how much.
If plan to drive the car as intended and you don't like rock chips, get PPF.

As someone who received his black 992 in July and then drove it from mid western Mexico to NorCal and back (6k miles) after full PPF, it was worth it's weight in gold. I have tons of road rash on the hips, a small area where PPF was scrapped (but the paint saved), several abrasions in the nose, and only three small perforations where it appears that PPF was perforated. Once I swap out the double-layer PPF on the hips and the front facia, my car will look practically like new, despite all the damage to the PPF. This is the way to go with any 911. Or, listen to the internet armchair experts with zero experience and see what your car looks like in a year.

Crusje

Yep. If you look at most ppf threads, the most adamant about it are people who don't even keep their cars long term. Just check out the thread about the guy trying to sell a car to the dealer with full ppf. Adds 0 to value. Just get it paint corrected before selling/trading it in.

alin2

I'm not sure it's true that folks most adamant about PPF are looking at PPF primarily as an ROI proposition...especially since a 911 is a depreciating asset regardless of PPF or not.

I think most of us PPF advocates (I have PPF'ed all my sports cars) just really hate rock chips & swirl marks, and PPF really does protect pretty well, although not perfectly. I know this is anecdotal, but I had a truck lose a tire tread 1 car in front of me on I94, it hit the roof of the car in front of me and hit my 992 GTS's front splitter and right headlight area hard enough to knock the front splitter partially off. Just one small scratch on the STEK PPF that's barely noticeable.

I also really like how ceramic coatings look (not everyone does) and how easy it makes it wash a car, dry it (water literally blows off with no need for a towel).

So, it will always be PPF and ceramic for me, but I get it's not for all. Honestly, it's not a crime to not get PPF. It's not like optioning a PDK...

Icegrill

How have the lower door sections weathered the miles? I’m doing suntek film this time around and they do a lower portion on their ‘track pack’ the way xpel does.

dudeoverthere

About 100 miles on the clock


Snow

No ppf. If I have rock chips in 26k miles I've not noticed. Sometimes I hose it down. Sometimes I let the dealer wash it. Having too much fun DRIVING, even in the snow, to worry about perfection.

Nein Eleven

I went full PPF and ceramic at the same place that @Jeff Whitten used, which is the most expensive/best in the area. My reasoning was that this car is intended to be a long term keeper (looking forward to being the old dude driving the nice 25yo 911 that he's owned since new some day) but I hate rock chips and scratches and waxing. I also came to the conclusion that I would do full PPF or no PPF as I can't stand the look of having a different finish on the front half versus the back half of the car along with different care and maintenance routines.

Icegrill

Brah! Save some chill vibes for the rest of us.

Pors911001

ppf for sure

F250to911

People on this forum are split 50/50 on this one. Some swear by it. some swear at it.
I fall in the camp of no ppf. I used to ppf my cars but I found that it just became too expensive and I was always driving around with scroungy looking ppf that was all pitted, torn and gathered dirt at the edges. Yes, I tried a detailer who would wrap the edges but then I would find cuts thru the paint and other horrible issues.

So I experimented and didn't ppf my 2020 992 C4 at all. Guess what, with ceramic coating and little paint correction every now and then with buffing compound, a DA buffer, and ceramic coating treatments, I found that most rock pits buffed out and were invisible. So I could drive around with a clean car with no pits and enjoy the paint work. If I did get the dreaded rock chip, I could usually use touchup paint, a little elbow grease, and a good buffing compound to almost hide the chip completely.

All the cars that I had ppf on looked bad after about 2 years and there was no way to correct the pits without just peeling off the PPF and starting over with new ppf, (self-healing my a$$). So most of the time I just drove around with a car that had badly pitted ppf, and black edges on ends of ppf, or knife marks that began to show up and could not be corrected. That's my experience.

To top it off the cars that had ppf the whole time did not increase trade-in value at all. Basically trade-in value is just whatever you can negotiate with a dealer, they only look at miles, vin number for options, tire wear, and if the interior was used by a smoker or not. Any paint chips and the dealer knows his body shop can easily and cheaply correct well enough that most people won't even notice them.