You do not consider a sealant a stand alone product? If not, why not? What, in your opinion, is a stand alone product?
I m not sold on a sealant as a stand alone product for my location. I live in Canada where we have very harsh winters , where salts sticks to your paint and where weather makes it very hard to keep applying these products during the winter months if you do not have a garage with some type of heating system. I have seen various tests done on sealants , and sooner or later they are mostly strips just by chemicals, without the need of polishing . If I live in a place where weather was more friendly there is not question that a sealant would probably be my go to product
Now , there is another thing to consider, and this is where I got into coating with my car, my car used to be parked underground and the paint was damage by some type of chemical dripping from the ceiling, it penetrate it some of the clear coat. I was able to remove the damage by wet sanding the paint , actually a professional had to wet sand and polish the paint. This is where I decided to have my car ceramic coated, I was probably on ceramic coating before it really picked up in the detailing community. It was somewhere in 2012 if I m not mistaken, there were only a small amount of detailers offering coatings here, opti coating was one of the most popular coatings back then .
My issues with ceramic coating over the years has been the constant maintenance , always some kind of special soap and always some kind of topper , in the winter times I used to take my car to a professional detailer twice to have reload applied on my car since I had not access to a heated garage. My issue has also been that it is very hard to do any type of correction with ceramic coating, I do not keep a bottle of ceramic coating in my garage, and if I did have a bottle they only have a short shell life once the product its open ( 6 months i think???) , furthermore you need to throw the microfiber out after application . I m not saying that its not possible or its rocket science, to me its just a pain in the butt , for someone that likes to do one a year light polish , its a bit frustrating. Even the application proccess on some of these coatings just seem to be all over the place, the flashing times and high spots is not something I want to deal with. I m not saying its not a good product, I had it , it fit what i needed in the past and it a good job. But I m finding hard to justify a full blown ceramic coating now .
To me a perfect stand alone product is a product that can survive the winter months, a nice 6-1 year durability under harsh conditions. A product thick enough to fight chemicals or bird droppings. It also has to be a product that provides some type of gloss to the paint , and that its easy to apply , it has a long shell life , its easy to do paint correction , a not too expensive , is friendly with cold weather applications , a product that I do not need to throw out my microfibers would be ideal too .
Lite coatings seem to fit most of my categories as standalone products , except they still required some type of light topper , so its not really a standalone product but its close enough to the other categories that it is a product that I m considering for my cars. Graphene is another product that in theory could fit all of my categories . I m not sure this turtle wax is that product but these type of products peak my interest
