Vehicle wrapping is a simple means of breathing new life into the appearance of your vehicle and it is an easy way to circumvent many of the pitfalls of repainting your car.
Vehicle wrapping involves coating all the panels of your vehicle with large sheets of vinyl and fitting these sheets to the exact shape of the car, van, or truck. These sheets can either be used to simply replenish the original color of your vehicle or to add an entirely new shade, look, or color to liven it up.
However, just as there are pitfalls to watch out for when repainting your vehicle, there are also many downsides to wrapping. Read on to find out what they are!
Customization
Deciding to wrap your car, van, or truck opens a door to seemingly unlimited options in terms of customization. With paint jobs, you can only choose between different colors, but with vinyl wraps, you can choose between different materials, such as stainless steel, carbon fiber, and chrome.
You can also choose between different finishes, such as satin, matte, gloss, semi-gloss, and metallic, among other textured finishes. On the other hand, as customizable as they are, it is impossible to get the desired texture of a high-end paint job with vinyl wrapping.
Cost
Wrapping your entire car, van, or truck is by no means the cheap alternative to getting a paint job. Some high-end vinyl wraps can be just as expensive, if not more so, than high-end repainting jobs.
However, there are more ways to be cost-effective when applying a wrap to a car, van, or truck than there is with repainting it. For example, if you just want one small panel of your car replenished, as opposed to the entire vehicle, it is far cheaper to get this professionally done than it would be to paint that area.
To that end, vinyl wrapping is a far cheaper means of testing out new colors and shades on your car without going all the way with a full wrap. However, it is worth highlighting that a huge con of vinyl wrapping is how expensive it can be to give your car a high-quality wrap makeover in comparison to a high-quality paint job.
It is possible to get a professional paint job from as low as $1,000, whereas the minimum price for a professional vinyl wrap is around the $2,500 mark. It is also worth noting that low-cost vehicle wraps will look like low-cost vehicle wraps – cheaper materials mean cheaper overall quality.
Removability
Vehicle wrapping is also a far more flexible means of revamping your car. Even if you decide to get a full wrap, the vinyl can be easily removed at any stage. Although this can be a difficult task to perform, it is not necessary to get it removed professionally. The car owner could do it themselves – if they are feeling confident, that is – with the assistance of a heat gun or by carefully peeling it away.
This option is not available with paint jobs, as you would have to repaint the entire thing if you desired to change it at any point.
The removable element of vinyl wraps also possesses other benefits, including the fact that it keeps the paint underneath totally intact while wrapped. This means that you could unwrap the vehicle and go back to the color and condition it was in before.
Application Time
There are little to no preliminaries that need to be undertaken to prepare your car for vinyl wrapping. The only thing that is required is an exterior wash, which doesn’t take long, and the wrapping process itself can be done quickly. Overall, vinyl wrapping will very rarely take longer than three days to complete.
This is a rapid turnaround time in comparison to getting your car professionally painted. Old paint must be stripped, and every new paint coat requires drying time before another can be applied. These different components to the process add up, meaning that you’re looking at between five days and three weeks for the entire process to be completed.
Durability
Overall, a good quality car wrap can last up to around 10 years, which is great, but it is significantly less than the expected lifespan of a high-quality paint job. If cared for, an expensive paint job could last an entire lifetime.
Both vinyl wraps and paint jobs require to be looked after to ensure homogeneity. Just as much as UV lights and scratches can prove detrimental to a good paint job, scuffs and scratches can reduce the quality and appearance of vinyl-wrapped cars. This can even cause the appearance and color to alter significantly.
Conclusion
To summarize, the pros of vehicle wrapping include the wide selection of customization options, the removability, and the application time required. Other, albeit limited, benefits include that it is possible to complete the wrapping process cheaply and that it is durable. However, there are several cons to vinyl wrapping, including that it is expensive to get a complete wrap done and the surface can still become damaged.
There are an almost equal amount of paint job pros and cons, so each mode of vehicle revamping deserves an equal amount of consideration.
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