I’m going to get right to the point, I can live with orange peel, I can live with unified swirl marks as long as they aren’t super intrusive. But man, I don’t know what happen to the paint quality from Mercedes, this is some of the softest paint I have ever seen. Having been around and owned numerous Mercedes, they’ve always had great paint, little to no orange peel and it was strong, it could withstand some abuse.

Quick backstory; had a 2015 C300, paint quality was good, no orange peel, and could be washed with it not swirling itself to bits. My 2020 was rear ended 2 weeks after I got it, and was detailed by the shop, which included them waxing it. The car is CPO (yea it was a loaner), and I noticed I couple swirls when I got it, but nothing insane and nothing out of the ordinary, so I didn’t care. I got it back from the body shop, and saw that they didn’t do the best job waxing it, some hazing was left, I figured it was some new guy who didn’t care about the job enough to do it correctly. Boy was I wrong. I’ve washed the car a few times since then, and there is literally nothing you can do to this paint, it’s like it scratches with the wind. I washed the car with the same stuff I’ve always used, dried how I always have, never have had any issues on any car, even the black ones. But man oh man, even with the supple-est of micro fibers, it swirls an insane amount, and that combined with wax just leaves terrible hazing marks. Even with some high end wax, and generous amounts of it, the paint still puts up a fight, and many times it wins. The weakness of the paint is also seen on the front end, where the car with almost 10k miles is splattered with rock chips reminiscent of a car with ten times the miles. Note it’s not the repainted parts of the car, it’s the whole thing.

This is something I’m noticing on new Mercedes, especially the American built ones, they have terrible orange peel, and the paint itself is super delicate, the GLE and GLS are some of the worst offenders to this. This post isn’t meant to be me going “omg I hate my Mercedes, what a mistake, what should I do?!?! Never buying one again blah blah blah.” I love the car, and in its class there is absolutely nothing that makes me even get close to second guessing my decision about this car. I’m just wondering what exactly is causing this and how many other people are noticing this trend on the newer cars.

I’m not a detailer and don’t have a garage stacked with supplies to clean cars, I know the basics, and how to clean a car properly, but this car likes to put up a fight. Many people who have helped wash the car and are more into the whole detail scene have also noticed the same thing.

 

My 2017 W166 has extensive orange peel. I haven’t noticed swirls. It does chip easily.

On the other hand the color is great (black) and I like the gloss. Overall better than most, but production defects are relatively obvious.

 

Same experience here even with ceramic coating. It's frustrating to take time for car care and you still get issues. Almost feels like paint protection film is a necessity of sorts.

 

I agree, if the car was new, I would’ve gotten the car ppf

 

One consistent thing I see in car forums is people calling out manufacturer for bad paint quality, especially paint durability. Unfortunately with all of the changes to paints due to environmental protections the paints used nowadays don't have the same durability that they had back in the day. I guess on the plus side it is a lot easier to get things repainted.

 

Yeah I remember reading somewhere that environmental constraints are messing with paint quality. It’s a shame but it is what it is.