Plastics on the Car That Fade

The dashboard is the surface in the cabin that the sun reaches for longer than any other, and after a few years it shows. The colour has faded, the surface holds dust you wiped off yesterday, and in hard light a fine web of hairline cracks appears across it. Outside, the same material tells the same story: unpainted black plastic around the arches and sills turns grey, and after rain it keeps the outlines of the drops, which do not go away on their own.

Why plastic ages differently from paint

Plastic has no clear coat above it to take the ultraviolet light on its behalf. The radiation breaks down the surface of the material directly, the surface loses its flexibility and cracks into microfissures. Dust and grease from hands hold on in those cracks more firmly than on a smooth surface — which is why a cleaned dashboard now stays clean for a shorter time than you were used to.

The second route is absorbency. Unprotected plastic has nothing to repel water and dirt with, so they settle into the surface and every cleaning has to get them out of there again. For the same reason outdoor plastic keeps rain spots.

Products that simply add optical shine do not stop this. They cover it for a while with a film that stops a matte dashboard from looking like a matte dashboard, and once the film is gone, the condition is where it was.

What a ceramic layer does about it

FEYNLAB Plastic V2 is a ceramic coating for interior plastics — the dashboard, door panels and centre console, matte and gloss alike. It does not work as a shine but as a sacrificial layer: it wears instead of the surface itself and stands between that surface and the UV light. After it, the surface is hydrophobic, so water and dirt run off instead of soaking in.

The layer adds no silicone gloss. A matte surface stays matte and a gloss trim stays gloss — the look of the cabin does not change with the treatment, what changes is what acts on it. The manufacturer quotes a service life of twelve months. The material needs a stable temperature and ventilation during application, so it is not a job for a car park between two drives.

Where the layer has its limits

A coating protects, it does not clean. It cannot go onto a surface with ground-in dirt or stains, and the order of work is the other way round: depending on the state of the cabin, first interior detailing or deep interior cleaning, and only then protection.

What has cracked stays cracked. The microfissures the dashboard carries today will not be sealed by the layer. It slows their further development and keeps small damage from adding up, but it does not undo what is already there.

It belongs on plastic, not on every surface in the cabin. Leather, fabric and alcantara are different materials with their own procedure. Exterior black plastic has a different product intended for it, not this one. On trim with polyester fibre in the hand area the manufacturer requires a test on a hidden spot.

And twelve months is shorter than what the manufacturer quotes for interior coatings on the other materials. Expect the plastics to be renewed sooner than the rest of the cabin.

When it is not worth it

For a car that sits in a garage and is driven little — the degradation does not add up fast enough there for protection to make sense before several years have passed. For a car you are selling in a few months: a twelve-month layer will not get the chance to earn back the reason you bought it. And for a dashboard that is already cracked deep — the layer will protect the rest of the surface, but the condition that bothers you on it will not change.

It is worth it, on the other hand, for a car that parks outside all year, for cabins with a large glazed area above the dashboard, and wherever you keep the interior up and want that cleanliness to last longer than a day.

Before you write to us

Tell us what car it is, which surfaces you want treated, whether the dashboard is matte or gloss, and what has been used on it so far — older silicone treatment has to be taken into account before any work starts. You will get the price for your car in the proposed solution. SEVEN Works is a certified FEYNLAB studio and installer; you will find us in Ústí nad Labem, open Monday to Friday 9–17, and another time can be arranged.

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