The Car You Make Your Living With

A van sits outside the workshop on Friday evening and has to be back on the road by Monday morning. Walk around it and you see the same thing on every work vehicle: sills scuffed by footwear and crates, a worn strip along the boot edge where cargo gets dragged over it, door handles dulled by keys and rings, a bonnet pitted with fine gravel marks. Nobody notices any of it while driving. The customer you pull up to notices. So does whoever buys the car a few years from now.

A work vehicle wears differently than a private car

On a private car you worry about the bonnet and swirl marks from the car wash. On a vehicle that earns money, the damage follows the job. It wears exactly where hands and cargo pass through — which happens to be exactly what a buyer looks at first during a pre-purchase inspection. Resale value doesn't fade evenly across the whole paint job. It fades in five or six spots.

Which film for this vehicle, and why this one

Films differ mainly in thickness and warranty length. In our workshop, work vehicles get the FlexiShield BHP line: 191 µm and an 8-year manufacturer warranty on the material. The thickest line in our lineup runs 216 µm with 12 years.

Eight years is roughly how long a vehicle like this works before it moves on. Twelve years of warranty would go mostly unused on a van: you'd be paying for years the vehicle is no longer yours. And a crate scraping the sills isn't stopped by a few extra micrometers — what holds is that the film is there at all.

It's a TPU film with a hydrophobic top coat, so dirt and road salt have a harder time sticking, and a self-healing top layer: wash marks and light hairline scratches close up with heat from the sun or warm water.

Where it pays back first

You don't need the whole vehicle. On a work vehicle, it makes sense to start with the entry sills, boot edge, door handles and front end — together a fraction of the coverage but most of the real wear. That's what partial PPF protection covers. Why exactly these spots wear so fast is explained in Scuffed sills and the boot edge and Stone chips on the front of the car.

We don't quote a price off the top of our heads. It depends on the vehicle and on how much work the paint underneath the film needs. What's certain is that four spots cost noticeably less than the whole body. You get the figure after we've inspected the vehicle, before any installation starts.

The rest of the body can be done later, whenever the vehicle happens to be standing still.

What has to be settled beforehand

The film locks in whatever condition the paint is in, flaws included. It's a physical layer against impact, not a polish. On a vehicle that's already put in some work, that means one extra decision: what gets evened out with paint correction beforehand, and what stays as it is.

We don't recommend guessing by eye. That's why we run a paint diagnostic before settling on scope, and tell you upfront where correction is worth it and where it would just add to the invoice.

We schedule around your operations

A vehicle that's standing still isn't earning. So we build the scope and the timing around when you can actually spare the vehicle — not the other way around. With a fleet, we work through vehicles one at a time so the rest keep running. Installation is done by Lukáš Vyskočil and Sebastian Vyskočil; we back the workmanship with a 2-year warranty and run warranty checks.

The link below works the same whether you have one van or ten vehicles. With several vehicles one more thing adds to the wear: company cars age faster, because nobody has the relationship with them they have with a car of their own. Tell us how many vehicles you have and how you use them, or call +420 739 374 074. Everything we do for company fleets is on the fleet care page.

Ask about fleet care