What is ceramic coating?

A coating is a liquid that cures to a hard, water-repelling layer a few microns thick; paint protection film is a urethane sheet several hundred microns thick laid over the panel. The coating changes how the surface behaves — gloss, cleaning, chemical resistance. Only the film has the mass to absorb a stone. Plenty of cars get both: film on the impact panels, coating over the top of it.

Manufacturers publish durability in years and the honest answer is that it depends on the product tier, the prep underneath it and how the car is washed. What a shop should promise is what it can stand behind in writing: the product's own warranty terms, plus its own workmanship warranty on the application. Anything beyond that is a maintenance conversation, which is exactly what a maintenance plan is for.

Because the coating bonds to whatever is on the panel. Wash, decontamination and, where the paint needs it, correction all happen first — and those hours are the real cost of the job, not the bottle. A coating applied over bonded iron or swirl marks locks the defect in under a layer designed to last years, which is the most common way a coating job turns into a warranty job.