What is with my paint? Puzzled (Pictures)

[Kaban]

Hey guys,

Hope everyone's holiday season is great!

I got a favor to ask if anyone knows what is going on with the paint on my car?

I owned the car for maybe four years, paint always looked brand spanking new on it. Basically, I haven't washed her in about three months. It had Wolf's BW on it since the summer. The car stays outside most of the time. Today, I pull it in the garage and noticed there are spots all over the paint. I thought it was dirt, but I ONR washed the trunk to inspect it, completely dried it and was shocked to see what is going on with the paint...

I have never seen anything like this. Doesn't look like water spots (at least to me), doesn't look like clearcoat failure because it's still extremely shiny and "deep" looking. Can't feel it, no texture to the spots.... I took these pics in a dark setting to get the best shots, but yes, it looks as bad in person as it does in these pics.... not sure what to do. Is it car cancer of some sort?

http://imageshack.us/a/img545/6219/dsc5457t.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img560/199/dsc5458p.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img844/8392/dsc5459b.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img21/8320/dsc5461.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img703/140/dsc5460r.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img845/525/dsc5462v.jpg


I only washed the trunk to see what it was... the rest of the car is still dirty....now kinda scared to wash the rest of it fearing the whole paint looks like this.

[Stang Man]

Almost looks as if some sort of co ntaminant in the water or dew may have stripped the Wolf's

[Kaban]

Almost looks as if some sort of co ntaminant in the water or dew may have stripped the Wolf's

Hmm, very interesting! Well, I am gonna machine polish half the trunk tonight and see what happens.

[Kaban]

I polished a good sized section on the trunk with the Flex. I tried:

LC black pad w/ 106fa = Made no difference
LC orange w/ SIP = Also no difference

Then I did an IPA wipedown on the entire trunk and added a new layer of BW, let it cure for about 15, buffed it off with a MF....

Made absolutely no difference. It's like the spots are below the clearcoat almost like discolored paint. If the car has been repainted by the previous owner.... why would it all of a sudden do this now? I used no harsh cleaners on it EVER. Always has some sort of wax/sealant on it. Kinda sucks to see this happen when you put so much effort in keeping it clean. Lost on what to do. It's definitely not clearcoat failure, no chance.

[Fishincricket]

What type of vehicle and or paint system is it?

[habeba86]

Def looks like it is stained somehow.....

[Kaban]

It's a 2001 Lexus ES300. I am almost completely sure it's all original paint. My dad's been in the bodyshop business for many many years and he inspected the car before. I believe he said it's not a respray.

Kinda clueless at the moment. Not even sure how long it's been that way, can't really see it outside since it's a lighter color and it was fairly dirty for the past few months. But in the garage under decent lighting.... it totally kills the whole paint. It looks nasty.

[Lim3]

Possible paint recall ? If you can't feel it and it has no texture. Maybe it's under the CC

[Andr3wilson]

Looks like a stain, or the clear is unstable. The car is 2001, now it is 11, coming on 12 years old, I have seen some older cars with blotchy paint like this. My understanding is UV causes the base coat to discolour. I have never really looked into this though.

They only way to fix this is respray. Unfortunately there is nothing in a bottle that can fix this

[swanicyouth]

That looks to me like somehow brake fluid or something similar got on your panel. Was anyone working on your car? Could they have laid rags on the paint? I saw brake fluid discolor paint once before and it sort of looked like that, or a chemical with similar properties.

[ruiemichelo]

I believe he said it's not a respray.

[cgreen1120]

This could be way off base but have you or anyone else covered your car with clear plastic sheeting? Like maybe you were parked near a building that was being painted. Clear plastic is like a magnifier in the sun. The pattern is not fluid like you would see from water or chemical stains. Can you get the paint thickness measured to see if the CC is thinning?

Craig

[mwoolfso]

If you do some research online I am sure you will find hundreds of complaints with Lexus paint; similar to what you are experiencing. BobbyG would likely be an excellent resource to comment on your pics, BTW.

I am nowhere near an expert but I suspect you are seeing the typical paint failure of an early 2000 Lexus. In general, with a 10+ year old car you have less than 25% of the UV protection in the paint. Excluding human, animal and industrial factors, without UV protection the paint will discolor over time due to typical sunlight exposure. Even with your attempts to do the right thing now in your car's "later years", you could be accelerating the process without even knowing it.

You don't have much to lose at this point, so try a yellow pad with SIP or a compound with more cut. If the staining is moving top-down, eventually you can get it out. However, if it is failure then it is a bottoms-up failure process and the paint is toast.

----

Now for my rant......

Personally, I think there was a well thought out plan within Toyota to take advantage of the large amount of leasing going on at the time. From 1996 to 2001, over 20% of all cars were leased vs. purchased. This was huge! They were into a 7-year trend of high volume leases so their business strategies by 2001 were so fine tuned to balance revenue growth and volume sales vs. cost mitigation for the original owner. One thing we see in many Lexus models that are leased often, soft paint.

I never owned a Lexus but in 2001 I knew a few folks who had them and mechanically speaking they were hit or miss. You just didn't have one problem with a Lexus - you had PROBLEMS.

Lexus paint in 2001 sucked, literally sucked. Dealers made a ton of money around that time with those "guaranteed coatings" they hawked at the time of purchase; giving original owners a false impression they don't need to worry about taking care of their car; at least for the 2-3 years they will have the vehicle.

Coupled with soft paint, unless the car was maintained regularly, this paint was expected to *only* last for the duration of their factory warranty. They expected that the second or third owner of the vehicle would see these problems (rather than the original owner), and by then plausible deniability would be their argument against most if not all claims of factory defect. The risks were minimal for Toyota and their dealer network.

Lexus wanted and expected their demographic to come back in 2-3 years and get another vehicle. It was the perfect storm back then and fueled growth in the company and economy.

[swanicyouth]

If you do some research online I am sure you will find hundreds of complaints with Lexus paint; similar to what you are experiencing. BobbyG would likely be an excellent resource to comment on your pics, BTW.

I am nowhere near an expert but I suspect you are seeing the typical paint failure of an early 2000 Lexus. In general, with a 10+ year old car you have less than 25% of the UV protection in the paint. Excluding human, animal and industrial factors, without UV protection the paint will discolor over time due to typical sunlight exposure. Even with your attempts to do the right thing now in your car's "later years", you could be accelerating the process without even knowing it.

You don't have much to lose at this point, so try a yellow pad with SIP or a compound with more cut. If the staining is moving top-down, eventually you can get it out. However, if it is failure then it is a bottoms-up failure process and the paint is toast.

----

Now for my rant......

Personally, I think there was a well thought out plan within Toyota to take advantage of the large amount of leasing going on at the time. From 1996 to 2001, over 20% of all cars were leased vs. purchased. This was huge! They were into a 7-year trend of high volume leases so their business strategies by 2001 were so fine tuned to balance revenue growth and volume sales vs. cost mitigation for the original owner. One thing we see in many Lexus models that are leased often, soft paint.

I never owned a Lexus but in 2001 I knew a few folks who had them and mechanically speaking they were hit or miss. You just didn't have one problem with a Lexus - you had PROBLEMS.

Lexus paint in 2001 sucked, literally sucked. Dealers made a ton of money around that time with those "guaranteed coatings" they hawked at the time of purchase; giving original owners a false impression they don't need to worry about taking care of their car; at least for the 2-3 years they will have the vehicle.

Coupled with soft paint, unless the car was maintained regularly, this paint was expected to *only* last for the duration of their factory warranty. They expected that the second or third owner of the vehicle would see these problems (rather than the original owner), and by then plausible deniability would be their argument against most if not all claims of factory defect. The risks were minimal for Toyota and their dealer network.

Lexus wanted and expected their demographic to come back in 2-3 years and get another vehicle. It was the perfect storm back then and fueled growth in the company and economy.

I can tell you I had a 2001 Toyota MR2. Not a Lexus, but from same parent company. The paint SUCKED. Areas of the car were painted 4 or 5x by the dealer in the first year I owned the car. I bought it brand new and paint was falling off the car. Eventually, I had to trade in the car due to the paint problems, less than 2 years after I bought it. Toyota would do nothing for me. Because of this, I will never buy a Toyota or Lexus again. After that I bought my first BMW. I couldn't believe the quality difference in the paint.

[mwoolfso]

I'm going to go off topic here, and I apologize ahead of time. I assure you I am well over this. I'm just expressing thoughts that were years in the making and it seems to be time for me to express them.

Toyota/Lexus expected their demographic to come back in 2-3 years and upgrade to a new vehicle. It was the perfect storm back then and fueled growth in the company and economy. Their paint didn't need to last more than 5-years, really. And back in 2001 there were governance stats that showed US auto sales were on a 7-year pattern of >20% lease rate. I am not saying I am 100% correct, nor can I prove it but the data is out there for sure and I am a good synthesizer of information.

How do I know this was even remotely possible? Lean-Sigma.

Toyota INVENTED Lean-Sigma as a way of encapsulating approaches to identify and eliminate waste in everything a company does, and I mean everything.

Waste in production lines, waste in product development, waste in managing people and assets, waste in communicating, waste in producing an invoice or paying an invoice. "Re-engineering" was THE buzzword around 2001. GE, Motorola, etc.... they all used these approaches, tailored them as needed to improve their operations. It was fantasic, entire legions/groups were established in companies giving people jobs roles that never existed before.

However, too much of anything is not a good thing, and when you take re-engineering to a very large degree there are both positive and negatives:

Positives --> you improve product quality and customer satisfaction, improve employee safety and morale, produce more widgets per hour and over time reduce cost to produce products and services.

Example: When your Motorola cell phone was defective (back in 2001 they had most of the market), customer received a replacement and the device was not repaired, it was destroyed. It was a quick phone call, no questions asked. It was more cost effective to invest in building new phones and gear up for the next model phone rather than "waste" effort to repair and resell what is likely a model on the verge of being discontinued soon.

Many people were shocked at this, and then quickly realized it was a fantastic and innovating approach with this Lean-Sigma "thing". Why repair something that is going to be replaced in a year or two anyway?

Example: Does anyone remember the news articles in 2004-2006 where whole computers were being shipped to countries with weak environmental laws and literally dumped in piles to rot? Boy that worked out well for the companies that sold this scrap to "distributors" that did the dumping.

Negatives --> Alienating a critical constituent required to keep the business alive; a customer, employee and/or a shareholder.

Example: That pile of computers leeched lead into the ground and groundwater of those undeveloped countries, infuriating governments and people, forcing them to go on the offensive and stop these practices; not to mention the toxic cleanup and health problems that ensued (which include death).

Example: Outsourcing production, manufacturing and services out of the USA so fast that the primary benefit was financial optimization moreso than service optimization. What was bad was the goals were not balanced well enough and risk management just wasn't happening as fervently as the movement of real estate and people. Shareholder won, India employees won, US employees lost, customers lost. Many companies Leaned too fast alienating customers to say the least.

I still, to this day, remember speaking to a Dell Commercial Business customer service rep who was clearly in India with his/her thick accent and hard to understand, with the name "Fred" or "Bob" (hilarious), unable to solve my problem for 2 days and unable to understand everything I was saying; working from scripts asking basic questions and not listening to me saying I already performed those steps. I had to tell this person to forward my call to the United States for the next tier of support; which after that the problem was solved within 20 minutes after the transfer. Two years later Dell moved their Commercial Business call centers back to the USA. LOL

Example: As an executive in IBM, I once had to resolve a conflict with a support team (in IBM) that flat out refused to call the customer to work on a technical problem the customer had with IBM supported gear. Neither the customer nor IBM could solve on their own and they both were at a dead-end. I knew if they worked together the problem would be solved quickly and the customer would be able to get back to normal operation. However, the optimizations IBM made in their processes were not "joint" optimizations, and recently implemented. I was specifically told by that IBM team that "client communication" was recently removed from their processes because it was deemed to be a non-value-added step in their ability to process and close their trouble tickets. Huh? Seriously? Then explain why the service level was missed because the ticket is not yet closed? Oh! You can't. Then why not make the phone call simply to save your precious service level metrics for the month because I am being measure on client satisfaction, and the client is not satisfied yet? LOL

----Now back to the matter at hand......

I never owned a Lexus but in 2001 I knew a few folks who had them. Mechanically speaking they were hit or miss. You just didn't have one problem with a Lexus - you had PROBLEMS.

Years later we see their parent company getting hit with massive fines and such for poor quality, tens of millions of recalls, corruption, etc.... They got complacent and caught with their pants down, at a time when governments and people were no longer willing to accept this type of behavior and started to look for it. It was always there.