The Best Car Scratch Removers and Polishes to Restore Your Car

Paint scratches are a practically inevitable part of vehicle ownership, even on relatively low-mileage cars. Roads are hardly sterile environments, and driving on them will find you picking up gravel, wood splinters, microscopic dust, and all manner of nasty stuff. These contaminants drag across body panels and damage the paint’s top clear coat, most often manifesting in the form of ugly swirls that show up in harsh light.

Luckily, there are a lot of products out there formulated to repair this clear coat damage, reverting it back to its silky-smooth shiny form. Liquid polishes use a slight abrasive quality to smooth out imperfections in paint. They can applied by hand using foam and microfiber pads, or an electric car buffer can be used to further enhance their effect. Doing it manually will require a lot of effort, so when correcting paint, we would recommend using a buffer.

What to Look for

The first thing to be aware of is while polishes and scratch removers are incredibly useful to the auto detailing process, they are not a cure-all. Detailing products are great for all the tiny blemishes over regular use, but things like deep key scratches or prolonged UV damage will require more excessive paint repair than over-the-counter polishes can provide. Be sure to consult professional detailing resources for what’s best on your car. It’s also crucial to fully wash and dry the car before applying scratch removal products.

It's strongly recommended that you also do a "test area" before you apply the product to the rest of the car. This test area can offer you a lot of information like what the proper RPM and OPM (and pad) are in order to remove the scratches without damaging the surrounding paint.

When it comes to specific polishes, some are more gentle and made to be applied semi-regularly, while others are abrasive and made to help reverse several months or years of wear. Generally, polish is used to eliminate haze from the compounding stage, whereas compound is the most abrasive. Some polishes are also marked to be used on specific types of surfaces or paint, as opposed to general purpose use. After scratch removal, apply a sealing compound like wax or ceramic to protect the paint long term. Some polishes additionally have a sealant included as part of their chemical makeup, speeding up the detailing process.

How We Selected

Popular Mechanics has picked these products at a variety of price points based on a combination of personal detailing experience and expertise from publications such as AutoWeek, Motor Authority, and SuperStreet.