Scott HD and Apex Detail are good. There are several others out of Europe that are good. Pan the Sponserizer just does overviews of products. He basically just a marketer.
The problem is filtering out what works or doesn't without spending a ton of money and time.
While I could never test all of the billion products that are out there, some are standouts with the vast majority all performing very similar.
Every so often a product comes out that is truly a game changer (that word is used far too often).
ONR
Hydro2/Wet Coat
Can Coat...etc.
You're right about the huge variability of ceramic coatings. This was a surprise to me up until 2 years ago. I had no experience with coatings and thought they were much longer lasting than they appear to be. UK 3.0 is still one of the best and it's been out for quite some time now. Can Coat is another.
IMO, you can't beat Can Coat and some of the "coating lite" products that are now available. Adam's has one, Dr. Beasley's and others. Can Coat is one product that overdelivers and punches above its weight. Coating lite products are basically true coating products just diluted a bit with less solids content. Longer lasting coatings often don't hold their hydrophobics past year 2 or 3. That's where a topper comes into play. But if you need to polish that also presents a problem to an existing coating. So, the lite coatings are good for a year or two and at that point you'll want to re-polish anyway although you certainly don't have to. That's another myth I wasn't aware of.
I have had Can Coat on my truck for 11 months and it's still beading like crazy on the sides. Hood not that well.
Anything you put on top of a coating in "theory" is supposed to prolong the life of the coating. I'm not convinced it does. It also depends on the chemistry you're using. Some don't adhere well to the base coating and wash off very quickly.
All of the spray/rinse Sio2 soaps and even spray sealants are using similar chemistry. They're meant to aid the surface by increasing the hydrophobicity so cleaning is easier, and water moves off the paint faster. This is a bit exaggerated by the companies now and not really as necessary as people think, but people want to see beading in today's market. The lotus effect....
The beauty of Can Coat is you can apply it like a sealant (it's even easier to use that Griot's 3 in 1 and blows it out of the water in every way) to all surfaces.
Lotus leaves have become an icon for superhydrophobicity and self-cleaning surfaces, and have led to the concept of the ‘Lotus effect’. Although many other plants have superhydrophobic surfaces with almost similar contact angles, the lotus ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Can Coat at 6 months isn't even breaking a sweat.
If you're interested in coatings, check this site out. He works for Esoteric now but has used over 30 coatings at his former job detailing trucks.
Disclaimer: I’m not a pro, nor even a ‘complete’ detailer; I just enjoy polishing paint and applying coatings to see how they do. Interiors make me cringe and I can barely clean interior glass with…
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