What is ResistAll and is it Worth it?

Good for you! There’s no reason to purchase a ResistAll protective package, even though many dealerships will use it as a come on to sweeten a new-car deal. Typically, they will put a price of about $900 and then when they sense that you may not want the add-on, they drop the price, ping to sweeten the deal.

The thing of it is this, your car doesn’t need this type of protection because it already has it. Baked into the final paint runs of your car — there are as many as 15 total layers of paint under the clearcoat (remember this, we’ll get back to it in a moment) — is a paint bond/hardener that keeps the top layer of your paint in good shape. Generally a isomer bond, this type of surface is the protection you car needs as it hardens the paint and the surface bond. The bond makes it nearly impervious to things like acid rain, bird droppings and the like, each of which can destroy your car’s painted surface.

At one time, protective coverings like ResistAll were needed. That time was about 35 years ago when the paints were just starting to change into what we know today. At that time — 1980 or so — paints were quite weak, so to speak, in that their chemical covalent bonds were not as strong as paints of the later 1980s when the real revolution in paints was realized. The key part of this was the development of clearcoat, the final piece of the paint puzzle. It is the bonding material that keeps the top layer paints in good shape. Indeed, at the time when this development occurred, the paints below had not caught up with the clearcoat on top. If you kept it up, using an isomer-based sealant (if you are old enough you probably remember the ads in a junkyard where the special sealant/protectant was wiped onto an old car that was then washed a number of times, you know that this was something special for the time), then you would seal the paint like clearcoat. Until the widespread use of clearcoat, this was what you had to do to protect the paint. At this time, ResistAll might have been warranted.

Today, though, it isn’t warranted. Indeed, it does more harm than good. ResistAll, believe it or not, is a very thin coat of varnish that is sprayed onto a car. For the most part, the surface is protected. The glass, though, isn’t. Instead, as sand and dust blow across the window, the surface is cut with thousands and thousands of nicks, cuts, and abrasions.

There is no easy way to remove this, unless you know something. That something is the product used by make-ready and cleaning shops, MX-7. It is really a chemical stripper for paint, and glass. For glass, there is a low-hardness abrasive compound that won’t scratch the paint or windows (that were covered with the substance on application). You just wipe a bit on the windows and off comes badly scratched varnish. What you are left with is a nicely clean window — the original clear glass appears. One of the caveats when using MX-7 is that you may need a second application because the original application was uneven.