The paint...

This is a 2010 with under 20K miles. All this has happened since I bought the car. It is garage parked at home and at work(reserved). I do NOT drive on gravel or crappy roads. It's all slow commuter crawl in the morning, and (high speed weeeeee!) commuting at night on paved major interstate highway roads. As I mentioned in another thread, I have an MB that is near 10 years old, with near 10 times the mileage, accumulated on the same damn roads, and the front of the MB is in 10x better condition )

Honest to God, at this rate I wonder if there will be ANY paint left on the front of the front bumper is say, 4 years. Is it this bad for everyone, or do I have a "special" example, and do I need to start whining to Infiniti/Nissan?

Other than this (again, I truly fear there may be no paint left on the front in a few years), the car is hands down the most fun to drive automobile I have EVER owned, and I'm a middle aged guy.

 

Car paints from decade ago have much better durability than anything new today. EPA can tell you why.

I bet most of the damage done when you are driving on
at high speed. I guess your G is much faster and fun to drive than your 10 years old MB. I wouldn't expect much better things happen when hard stores meet soft plastic when those high riding tire exposing crossovers/trucks spraying stones backwards. Yea, you are right, this sucks!

 

Same issues here buddy, and most people on the forum. Mine seems to not ding quite like yours though. Where your "spots" are white, mine are are all black; I have the grey as well... Weird.

 

Of all the cars I've had Infiniti paint is by far the most fragile IME, chips fly off the car if you look at it the wrong way We've had an 07 and an 09 and both are terrible chipped & swirled, although I detailed all the swirls out.
Just getting a hood repaint (along w/ new doors, etc, from my T-bone incident) and put on a new bumper so I'm definitely going to use 3M paint defender as soon as my paint has cured.

I know all auto paint is more chip/swirl prone due to low VOC requirements, but our other cars of the same years as our Infinitis have nothing close to the chips & swirls of our Gs, it's really pathetic

 

Thanks for the thoughts. It's comforting to know this is generally typical, but yep, it certainly isn't reasonable.

I just washed our MB, and I can confirm there are essentially NO chips on the front bumper.


I'm taking it in soon for the first stealership service, and as meaningless as it may be, I am going to force them to enter my concern on the chipping into my service record. I suppose if it gets really stupid silly, like the front beginning to literally peel from all the chips, I'll at least have a meager paper trail behind my ranting, from the first visit.

 

I am kind of surprised that Infiniti doesn't offer clear bra either through the dealership or from the factory. Lexus offers it as an option from the factory. If I had bought my G new and planned on keeping it for a long time then I would have gotten clear bra.

OP maybe if you plan on keeping yours for a long time replace your bumper with a new one and put clear bra on it. I've heard of others doing that for the very reason you're upset.

 

I had a 2010 Accord before my G37 and the paint on the Honda was horrid at best. I had chips on the front, sides, top and back. Any hard corners where bumper met headlights and tailights would chip off and would worsen as time went on. Personally, the Infiniti is far better.

Like most have said though, the removal of lead based paint is the main culprit. Thanks EPA.

 

My front bumper looked fine when I turned it in at lease end (3 years @ 30k miles).
No rock chips or anything but I had it repainted after I hit a freaking deer.

 

Clear bra is the answer. When I got my 09 G few years ago I was on the fence about installing Venture Shield. During the few days I hesitated, I got a couple of nice rock chips.

My wife's FX used to look like it was shot at from BB gun. And that car was not even driven that much. Every time I washed it and looked at the paint, I wanted to cry.

Got Xpel clear bra installed on my 13 xS pretty much right away. It was an option offered by the dealer. But yeah, I agree, with the way this paint chips, it should be a factory add-on.

 

hah! my sport lip is 2 years old and is DESTROYED from all the highway driving, no matter how much I take care of it, its pretty much a disaster. I should of vinyl'd it when I bought the lip

 

Hmm. I remember that thread.

So by 2 years old, you must be measuring time with the seldom used 7-month calendar...

 

That is indeed horrible....looks like you've been following gravel trucks. My 2010 G never had the problem...my 2013 only have 4,000 miles so I can't really tell yet.

 

I had the invisible bra....3M film installed at by dealer when new....works great. I commute 80 miles a day and rge fromt and hood look new. Well worth it.

 

This. If you go on any other car site, virtually everyone will contain threads about "paint issues". All cars have crappy paint these days. My brother in law's 5 series is a ****ing disaster up front.

Even on paved roads, there is still alot of debris that comes up if you follow too closely at higher speeds no matter how smooth the highway looks. And following 1 to 2 car lengths behind is too close in preventing chips.

 

If you maintain a reasonable (or more than reasonable) distance from the cars in front of you, most of these issues go away.

However, if you do, then forget about carving through traffic at speeds greater than the cars around you. That's not going to happen anymore. And you'll have to learn how to let other cars cut rudely in front of you without getting angry, because that will happen on a regular basis if there's a big gap between you and the car in front. If you think about it, in addition to saving your front end paint from chips, there are other benefits to driving like like that. It's safer, and better for the soul to let the road-rage moments slip away.

It took me decades to realize this... it's so much more rewarding to enjoy driving the car when it's personal, rather than when the moment is all mixed up with other drivers.