The car is otherwise fine, and yet your eye keeps stopping at one spot: a scratch under the door handle, a scuff on the bumper, a mark on the door from something that caught it in a car park. Spot correction is for you when one or a few such spots bother you and the rest of the paint looks good. We polish just the affected area and leave the rest of the car untouched.
If the spot feels rough to the touch rather than scratched, it may just be dried-on residue that a thorough wash with residue removal will remove, with no need to polish. If instead the whole paint has gone dull and fine swirls show up in the sun all over the car, treating one spot won't solve it; a step up is light paint enhancement. If you're not sure which is your case, start with paint diagnostics.
Why just that one spot
A scratch disappears by removing a small amount of the top glossy layer of paint around it. What gets removed doesn't grow back. That's why, for a single scratch, we don't touch the whole panel or the whole car: we keep the work to where the defect is, and everywhere else the paint stays at its original thickness. That reserve will come in handy the day you need more. Why it matters so much is explained in the article How much paint is on a car.
What you're paying for
- Assessing the defect. We inspect the spot and measure the paint thickness in it and around it. That tells us how deep the defect goes, how much we can afford to remove there, and whether polishing will get rid of it. We tell you this before we start.
- Care for a repainted panel. Paint from a body shop is baked at a lower temperature than factory paint and behaves differently under the pad. If you know a panel has been repainted, tell us – we factor that in from the start.
- Machine polishing limited to the defect area. We remove only as much as the defect needs, and no more.
- Blending into the surrounding paint. We finish the repaired spot so its gloss matches the paint around it.
The price here mainly comes down to the defect itself. A fine swirl mark that's stayed within the top glossy layer levels out quickly. A scratch that goes deeper takes more work and more care, because we can only remove as much paint from that spot as we've measured there. A bigger scuff means a larger area to polish and to blend into the surroundings. And it also depends on where the defect sits: on a repainted panel we look for the right approach more carefully than on factory paint. That's why we can only tell you the price once we've seen the actual spot.
When there are several spots
Sometimes an inspection turns up more similar spots than were visible at first, spread across the whole car and showing even under an overcast sky. At that point a targeted repair stops making sense, and we'll suggest paint correction for the whole surface.
Tell us where it is
Tell us which panel the defect is on and what you think caused it. If you can, attach a close-up photo and one from further away, so we can see how big the spot is. We'll look at the rest in person.