[vipe155]

Hi everyone, new guy here.

So, I have a younger brother that bought a 2015 Cruze LT about a year ago. Cars been good so far, no issues. Then he contacts me a couple days ago about some paint problems that have cropped up recently on the car. I've attached some pictures of this.

What is going on here? The car was bought with less than 20K on it, no reported issues/accidents/damage. It looked great up until recently. A GM dealer told him someone must have replaced those parts and done a crap job repainting them. He doesn't know what to do, as this makes the car look terrible and it's only 3 model years old. I think it looks like clearcoat lifting myself, but all I have it pictures. I'll be traveling to see him in a few days and look at the car myself. The car was recently really dumped on sitting outside by Hurricane Harvey, but not flood damaged from the storm.

So any chance this has some GM paint job/clear issue, or does it look like some inferior, non-disclosed fix?

Thanks

 

[Tomko]

Hi everyone, new guy here.

So, I have a younger brother that bought a 2015 Cruze LT about a year ago. Cars been good so far, no issues. Then he contacts me a couple days ago about some paint problems that have cropped up recently on the car. I've attached some pictures of this.

What is going on here? The car was bought with less than 20K on it, no reported issues/accidents/damage. It looked great up until recently. A GM dealer told him someone must have replaced those parts and done a crap job repainting them. He doesn't know what to do, as this makes the car look terrible and it's only 3 model years old. I think it looks like clearcoat lifting myself, but all I have it pictures. I'll be traveling to see him in a few days and look at the car myself. The car was recently really dumped on sitting outside by Hurricane Harvey, but not flood damaged from the storm.

So any chance this has some GM paint job/clear issue, or does it look like some inferior, non-disclosed fix?

Thanks

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In my more than 35 years of driving I’ve never seen a clear coat failure like that on a factory paint job.

But I have seen many cheap body shop jobs go like that.

For the record, my 2014 is painted that same color. I have zero problems with my paint and it has spent its entire life ungaraged and outdoors.

 

[vipe155]

Would you say it looks like peeling clear coat? Like maybe someone touched up stuff and then sprayed a cheap/incorrectly applied finish over it? I know that Carfax reports aren't perfect, but the thing wasn't very old and had no entries on its record for any kind of bodywork. Dealership said it would something like $2000 to redo those two panels.

 

[Robby]

No doubt it is clear coat delaminating.

Repair shops (and insurance companies) are not required to report accident damage in all states so I take Car Fax reports with a grain of salt.
This car may have had paint repairs performed prior to its first sale or prior to your brothers purchass between owners. Neither event would have been reported to any agency.

The bumper covers are painted at the supplier site that makes them, and the car body is painted at the assembly plant. Since this car shows delamination of parts originally painted apart from one another it can be safely assumed that the affected areas were refinished sometime after final assembly since the clear is affected on both parts.
This, of course, takes Chevrolet out of the picture since they likely had no part in the repair.

Sux.

Rob

 

[Blasirl]

Pull the trunk liner out and see if there were any repairs done underneath. If so you may have some recourse through Carfax.

 

[Taxman]

The back bumper looks just like the presumably original paint on both bumpers of my 1998 Taurus. And the Taurus didn't look like that when it was 15 years old. Not acceptable on a 2015. Fixing dings and respraying is a normal part of used car preparation, but spraying whatever they used on that car, or not doing proper surface prep first, is not.

It's a pity because a really good PDR tech might have been able to fix whatever was wrong with the C pillar without painting it. Then you'd be looking at just a bad paint job on a bumper and you might be able to just hang a used bumper on it.

I'd shop around some on the paint work.
$2000 sounds a bit high, it's more than I paid last week to spray a new door and fender, and respray a front bumper to get rid of a few stone chips, in that same color. And I used a proper shop with a $25,000 controlled climate paint booth and the original water based paint.

I'm guessing more like $1000 to paint the C pillar, left quarter panel, and rear bumper. And I don't think surface preparation should cost more than a hundred or two. They'll have to do some blending in the C pillar/roof rail area but it's an easy color to match and you'll never be able to detect it without a paint thickness gauge (BTW, one of these tools might have saved your brother from buying the car).

 

[CruzeSP]

Yu need to get a paint depth gauge on the panned and see how thick the paint is , you should be able to tell nobody who would do that bad of a job would bother to sand back to metal !

 

[vipe155]

Thanks everyone for the info and advice. I'll be seeing the car next week, and will try to figure out what's going on with it. Obviously those panels look terrible...probably will have some other reputable places look at the car to get an idea of what to do with it going forward.

 

[Snipesy]

The newer GM clear coat never seems to cure as much the older stuff.

It's possible the hurricane compromised it, water got into the clear coat and the bond became much weaker. It's the same concern I expressed here.

Possibly related. I wouldn't point to a bad aftermarket paint job yet.