Wash it before you decide anything
Cars pick up other people’s paint. A shopping cart, a garage door frame, a bike handlebar or another car’s bumper leaves a streak of its own colour sitting on top of your clear coat, and in a driveway it is indistinguishable from a gouge into your own paint.
So the first step is soap, water and a clean microfibre, working along the mark rather than across it. Dry the panel. Then look at it from two angles in daylight — straight on and at about thirty degrees — because a shallow mark disappears at one angle and shouts at the other. Shop lights and phone torches flatter paint; sunlight does not.
Then judge the depth, once, without a magnifying ritual: a mark that vanishes while the panel is wet and returns as it dries sits in the clear coat and can often be machine-polished away; a mark that stays visible on wet paint is through the colour, and white, grey or a metallic glint at the bottom means primer or bare metal — steel needs sealing before a salted winter, and on an aluminum panel the bloom is white oxide rather than red rust, but bare metal is bare metal. The full layer-by-layer ladder lives in our scratch depth guide; the rest of this page is about what is only true when the car is weeks old.
Ceramic packages, film, and what a repair does to them
If you bought the dealer’s ceramic or “paint protection” package at delivery, the repair touches it. Machine polishing removes some or all of a ceramic coating in the polished area, and a refinished panel loses it entirely — the coating sits on top of the clear, so new clear means bare new clear. Whether the package’s own guarantee survives depends on its written terms: some sellers require re-application by their applicator after any paint work, so read the certificate before the repair, not after, and bring it with the car.
Paint protection film is its own case, and sometimes it is good news: film exists to take exactly this kind of hit, and a scratch that lives entirely in the film is fixed by replacing a sheet of film, with your factory paint untouched underneath. Where the damage went through, the film is lifted back past the repair area, the panel is refinished, and new film goes on after the paint has fully cured — a step that adds calendar time to the end of the job and belongs on the plan from the start.
Factory paint itself is part of the calculation. Modern lines apply clear thinly and consistently, which means a new car has less clear to sacrifice to polishing than the cars of fifteen years ago — a compound-heavy “correction” from a detailer can spend a meaningful share of it on day one. That is a reason to have depth judged before anyone starts rubbing, not a reason to panic about a wash mark.
Damage found at delivery or after the first service visit
Some first scratches turn out not to be yours. New vehicles cross the country on trains and transporters, sit in compounds, and get shuffled around dealer lots by many hands; transport and lot damage is normally repaired before handover, but not always caught. Walk the car in daylight before you sign the delivery paperwork, and if you find a mark, have it written on that paperwork with a commitment in writing — repair, replacement panel or price adjustment — before you drive away. A scratch noted at delivery is the dealer’s to resolve; a scratch reported a week later becomes a conversation about parking lots.
The first service visit deserves the same habit. Photograph the car quickly before you hand the key to any service lane, and walk it before you leave the lot afterwards. Damage found at pickup is raised with the service manager the same day, while the loaner records and lot cameras still mean something.
None of this involves your insurance company. Damage the dealer is responsible for is the dealer’s cost, and putting it through your own policy — with your deductible and your claims history — is exactly the outcome documenting early protects you from.
Touch-up, spot repair or a full panel with a blend
Dealer touch-up bottles have a place, and that place is a stone chip on a lease you are handing back next spring. On a car three weeks old, a bead of colour laid into a scratch sits proud of the surrounding surface, catches light differently and reads as a repair from across a parking lot. It stops corrosion. It does not restore the finish.
Spot repair works when the damage is small, centrally placed in a panel and away from edges: the area is levelled, primed, colour applied to a controlled area and the clear feathered out and polished into the existing finish. It is quick and it holds up when the geometry cooperates.
Where a scratch is long, crosses a feature line, or sits on a colour that is difficult to blend — metallics, pearls, three-stage whites and the deep reds — we refinish the panel and blend into the adjacent one. That is not upselling. Factory paint varies between production batches, and a panel sprayed to its own code sitting hard against an original panel will show a line in daylight. Blending walks the colour across the joint so your eye never finds the edge.
Every colour gets sprayed onto a test card and checked outdoors before the car is masked, and our refinish work carries a lifetime warranty on paint.
Claim it, or keep it off your record
A single scratch on a single panel usually costs less than a collision deductible. That is the whole calculation for most people, and when the repair sits below the deductible there is no reason to open a claim at all — you would pay the deductible and receive nothing.
The other consideration on a new car is the record itself. A claim opened weeks into ownership travels with you at renewal, and for a cosmetic repair on one panel that trade is rarely worth it. Where a claim does make sense is when the scratch came with a dent, when several panels are involved, or when somebody keyed the car — vandalism is handled differently from a collision, and it is worth asking before assuming.
Leased and financed vehicles get one more thought. Lease-return standards measure damage against a chart, and a scratch you decide to live with for three years becomes a chargeback at return calculated by someone whose interests are not yours. Fixing it early, once, tends to be the cheaper path.
Send photos of the panel and our estimator will tell you which of the three repairs it is before you drive anywhere — including the answer nobody expects, which is that it will polish out and you should not spend money on it.
Questions people ask
The scratch was there at delivery — is that the dealer’s problem?
If it is noted before you sign, yes, almost always: transport and lot damage is the seller’s to put right, and the delivery paperwork is where that gets recorded. Photograph it, have it written down, and get the remedy in writing too. Raised days later, the same mark becomes an argument, which is why the daylight walk-around before signing is worth the ten minutes.
Is the dealer touch-up pen good enough for now?
For a scratch that has reached bare metal and cannot be repaired this month, a careful dab of touch-up seals the steel and stops corrosion spreading under the paint. Treat it as a bandage. It sits above the surface, it does not level, and it does not gloss like the panel around it, so plan a proper repair rather than accepting it as the finish.
I paid for ceramic coating — does a repair strip it?
On the repaired panel, yes: polishing removes coating in the worked area, and a refinish replaces the surface the coating sat on. The rest of the car is untouched. Check the coating’s written terms before the repair, because some packages require re-application by their own applicator to keep their guarantee, and plan for the panel to be re-coated once the fresh paint has cured.
Does having a panel repainted affect the factory paint warranty?
A manufacturer’s paint warranty covers the finish that manufacturer applied. Once a panel is refinished, that panel is covered by the shop that refinished it — ours carries a lifetime warranty on paint and refinish work. The rest of the vehicle is unaffected. Keep the invoice, because it is the document that proves who is responsible for what.