What is Fallout on Cars?

What is Fallout on Cars

What is fallout? Fallout can be tiny shards of hot metal, jet fuel burn-off, or any other airborne contaminants that embed themselves onto any surface they land, including both painted surfaces, as well as glass.

Once embedded in your clear coat, the fallout will oxidise and therefore begin to rust; creating the tiny orange dots you see, thinking your vehicle is starting to rust. (Easily visible on white vehicles.) If left unattended, over time, the paint will become dull, faded, lack lustre, and will actually begin to rust.

If you have a darker coloured vehicle, you may not be able to see the fallout as easily as you can probably feel it. If you’ve ever rubbed your vehicles paint and it felt rough/bumpy, or at least not as smooth as it should be; your paint has become contaminated. It should feel as smooth as glass! (Unless of course, your glass is also contaminated with fallout!).

New Car Fallout

You may be wondering why, or how, a NEW car has small orange dots on the paintwork? This can be caused from fallout from trains, industrial factories, and shipping yards that may have been involved in the transportation of new vehicles, to dealerships.

Most new cars are delivered by train these days. In most cases, vehicles will sit around the factory before being transported to a shipping yard to sail to another port (More factories and fallout) to board another transporter before finally arriving to the dealership… (And potentially yet another trip to another branch of dealership!)

This can take a few days, but most often takes weeks, to reach the dealership, allowing for plenty of time for paintwork to get its fair share of fallout from the factories, trains and boats.

Used Car Fallout

Just like new cars, all older and used cars suffer from the same external fallout contamination by driving near, or parking at, airports, train stations, factories, industrial yards.

The more common areas you may find fallout are on tailgates, the lower extremities of the body. This type of fallout is predominantly iron from the brake discs and brake pads.

Automatic vehicles will have far more fallout issues, especially iron fillings, on their lower bodies due to the way that they require far more braking.

In order to correct paint, and possibly apply a paint sealant or wax to help maintain its factory shine, the paint must be cleaned properly in order for the sealants or waxes to adhere correctly. (Much like moisturizing your face, it’s very important to firstly clean your face properly!!)

What to do?

Sadly, we cannot prevent airborne particles/fallout from occurring. We can definitely help minimize, however. Cleaning paint/glass with clay bar and or the exclusive Mercedes Benz chemical, “Fallout,” will remove the actual fallout. Applying paint protection, either a sealant or wax, will also help keep your surfaces slippery smooth and help minimize fallout attaching to your paint.

Ask your Mercedes Benz Country Hills Advisor about how we can help you today!!