Honda won't do anything exciting like that anytime soon. They used up their dwindling stock of excitement on the new NSX, and now we have to wait for it to accumulate drip by drip again...

The only thing it's effective at is making the roads uglier.

Customers are generally stupid and blind when they buy cars anyways. A buyer will overlook blatant colour mismatches between bumper covers and the rest of the vehicle at the dealership and tailgates that are a little offset on one side, but you take that same person to the bodyshop and then the magnifying glass comes…

I'm Canadian, and I'm tired of paying for people who don't even whine in a proper language.

Actually, for durability purposes this might be rather shit. I can't imagine that diamonds have much flex in them, so when struck by gravel and other rock-chip causing things, the diamonds in the paint might end up separating from the substrate below and causing delamination.

Liberace would've already had a car done in gold Alsa metal flakes over chrome paint, with the candelabra as a hood ornament. But at least it'd be more tasteful than this.

"lol, dawg, I got mah whip two-toned wit crome paint down below for the bizness end, and dymonz up top for the party side of things!"

VW.

Yup. Though it depends on the program. The tech school I went to to get my autobody tech certification had a row of nearly identical Focuses donated to the program that were for repairers to cannibalize off each other and swap stuff like frame rails for repairs. The donated cars that were nice? They went to first…

My '04 Lightning agrees because it knows a badly-concealed secret about SRT-10 Rams: They can't take a corner worth crap, and they usually eat wheel bearings like candy.

But Ram interiors are functional! You can loofah your hands just by rubbing them all over the 80-grit dash!

It depends on who makes it. I've shot the ALSA chrome paint before, and it's not something you can buy in a spray can at Home Depot. It does look like chrome, and it's pretty good stuff, but it's also stupidly expensive too.

One of the most common ways, especially when wanting an even shine over all surfaces, especially when they are of a variety of substrates, is paint. ALSA Corp makes an excellent, albeit expensive, chrome paint that does a great job at turning anything into being blingtastic.

When I went through tech school for my refinisher training, the instructors relayed this story, and apparantly relay it for every class still. The lesson of "Sometimes you have to paint extra stuff to make people STFU" is always applicable.

Oh yeah. I've worked in body shops as a repairer with a hell of a lot of fully certified techs that treat working on them like they were made of plutonium. And why not, when something is designed to deploy at 99mph.

Factory pieces aren't all painted at the same time, usually. The plastic covers, mouldings, and such, will usually be painted in separate batches if the supplier that the manufacturer is using isn't already painting them for delivery. The vehicle's shell and metal panels might be all painted the same, but if they're…

The easy answer is collision repair in any form, but there's one that's really visible when you fuck it up: Paint. Or, as professionals call it, refinishing. Doing your own refinishing can open up a whole world of awful questions you have to ask yourself, such as:

The last time we did that, we ended up with the TC by Maserati. Granted, it was still better than what happened with ze Germans running the show.

For some reason, this seems like a perfect, belated response to, "Fuck GM" and "I want to beat Chevrolet with a bat"

That's because it's expensive, can be annoying to match to another batch, and usually needs a good cut and polish to make the clearcoat not look like rock guard when it's done. Not to mention that on a lot of curves and expanses, it looks more like a sequined dress than something cool.