Hyundai has once again found itself in the crosshairs of local media, this time over a quality control issue: bad paint. The owners of some recently built models (Elantras seem especially prone) have been complaining that their relatively fresh white paint is peeling off for no reason at all. The coverage has brought out thousands of sympathetic owners suffering from the same plight. They’re sharing stories, photos, and videos of cars with large swaths of the finish missing completely.
If this sounds familiar, there’s good reason for that. Hyundai has chased paint shop gremlins before, also involving cars with white finishes. And Toyota has its share too; the company even extended warranties on some models to address it (with some owners waiting months or more for their fix). So, uh, what’s up with that?
@WSMV @JFinleyreports "Investigates uncovered paint not chipping off, but falling off in chunks on one of the most popular brand of cars out there." @Hyundai @HMGnewsroom @Hyundai_Global #HyundaiPaintSux #Hyundai #HyundaiPaintPeeling #ItsYourJourney https://t.co/uP5eYASgnK
— Hyundai Paint Peeling (@HyundaiPaintSux) August 16, 2024
Chances are, if you’ve noticed something weird about a car, The Autopian’s David Tracy has noticed it too. As it happens, he’s been documenting peeling white paint on relatively new cars for quite some time now. He even got so curious about it that he called up some industry paint specialists to see if they could explain exactly what is going on. Short version? Shrugs all around.
You should read the above if you’re curious about the technical side of things, as Tracy and his contacts at automotive paint supplier PPG take a reasonably deep dive into the causes of delamination—the process by which layers of paint separate both from each other and from the surface itself. Errors in the paint formula itself can lead to this problem, but if that were the case, to paraphrase PPG’s representatives, somebody would have complained to them about it by now. This suggests that the issue is not with the formula, but rather with the application process.
Another @toyota #blizzardpearl paint recall victim @luisodavilas https://t.co/fdkjlipY6g pic.twitter.com/C9CRmdfqTM
— Nasreen Stump (@ramblingstump) November 11, 2023
A great deal of the work involved in producing an attractive and durable paint finish is in the preparation. Each layer has to be applied just so in order to guarantee that it bonds both with the layer it was sprayed on and with the layer that will be sprayed on top of it (minus the outer layer, of course). Any errors in this process can result in a finish that is more prone to peeling. A truly bad finish may start flaking off before it even leaves the factory.
That’s all well and good, but if the above is true of every paint finish, why is this issue so much more prevalent with white? PPG says that white can be challenging to apply because automakers are trying to cover up dark metal surfaces of different shades adequately while using the least amount of paint possible. This all makes sense; thicker paint adds weight and cost, and nobody wants either.
Compounding the issue with white is the fact that it’s simply everywhere. Roughly a third of all cars delivered worldwide are white, and many of those are fleet-spec vehicles (work trucks, utility vehicles, taxis, and the like) that are not being sold to customers who are shelling out for high-end finishes. Couple the color’s unique application challenges with its ubiquity, and the result is that if you happen to see a vehicle with shipping paint, odds are it’ll be white. Call us superstitious (or at least a little stitious), but it sure sounds like the universe is trying to tell everyone to stop buying cars with boring paint finishes.
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