Here’s How Much Damage Shopping Carts And Parking Garages Can Do To Your Car

The parking lot. It’s an absolute nightmare for folks with shiny cars, as rogue shopping carts roll around like wayward tumbleweeds, doors are flung open haphazardly, and bad drivers pay more attention to their phones than on navigating spots. The traditional solution to this dilemma is parking your car an ungodly distance away from the Costco entrance, but there is another answer that allows you to be lazy and park right up front, we’re putting it to the test. We’ve covered half of our 2014 Nissan Murano Crosscabriolet with an invisible polyurethane film called XPEL PPF, and then we hammered the car with the worst a parking lot has to offer — carts, parking garage pillars, and adjacent car-doors. We found that the parking lot truly is a nice car’s worst nightmare; here’s how well PPF protected our mighty purple Cross-cab.

You may recall our last article about one of the weirdest cars ever made, our 2014 “Merlot” purple Nissan Murano Crosscabriolet — a strange convertible crossover SUV from Nissan’s sometimes bizarre Carlos Ghosn era. It involved Jason Torchinsky trying the classic “police slide” over the hood; as Jason is rather short, this proved ridiculously difficult, though it did result in a lot of scratches (and dents) on our car, with the XPEL PPF side clearly faring better.

But we’re not chumps here at The Autopian. [Editor’s Note: David, our lawyers are uncomfortable with us just coming out and saying we’re not chumps, given all the evidence to the contrary –  JT] We understand that, while police slides probably represent the average America’s #1 concern when it comes to vehicle paint, we figured we’d also talk about parking lots, which have to be at No. 2 on the list — 3 at most.

To do this, Jason and I drove around LA, me at the helm, and Jason in the passenger’s seat with a lasso in hand, attempting to tie up a lost shopping cart grazing the concrete of LA. After we managed to find one eating out of a dumpster, we put it in the back of my Chevy K1500 and convinced it to ram itself over and over against our Nissan Murano Crosscabriolet. And boy was it rough.

Parking Lot Madness

The thing about shopping carts is that many have little plastic bumpers covering the front corners, and everywhere else is generally fairly rounded (i.e. not particularly sharp). So when Jason and I rammed and rubbed the carts up against the Crosscab, we didn’t see huge damage:

Here’s Jason pushing the carts hard into the car’s bumpers:

Jason even drove into the cart:

This was fun, but, we found, there are really two parts of a cart that can do serious damage to a car. The first is the handle-end, which often does not contain a bumper of any kind — it’s just raw metal. If that rear side of a cart bangs up against your car, it can and probably will leave a scrape, like it did here:

The second part of a shopping cart that can inflict some truly painful damage is the sides. I had never really considered the sides of a shopping cart a huge threat for whatever reason, but the horizontal bars — which can easily rub up against a car’s bumper – will essentially burn right through the paint. It’s really bad, as I’ll show later.

Torch and I also did a few door dings, courtesy of my 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee parts car’s surprisingly sharp rear doors:

The Dangers Of The Parking Deck

We also headed into a parking garage to experience some of the unique challenges associated with those dark, tight decks. Jason bashed both mirrors into columns:

And he opened both doors into them, too:

But probably the worst damage we’ve done to the car so far — maybe tied with the cheese-grating — came from this half-inch thick steel plate protecting this pipe:

[Editor’s Note: Look at that screenshot. David could have picked one with my eyes open, but no. Thanks a lot, David. – JT]

Jason was supposed to just lightly graze the plate, but he ended up ramming right into it, deforming the bumpers, though they somehow snapped back into place afterwards:

A Look At The Damage

I recently took a second look at the damage, and it’s clear that, as far as shopping carts go, as I mentioned before it’s really two areas of a cart that can cause the most damage. The first being the handle, which in our case scratched the raw, non-PPF-protected side, while the PPF side had self-healed by the time I took some “after” shots:

I could see that probably buffing out, just as I could see the paint possibly buffing out of the mirrors that we hit on the parking garage pillars:

What’s absolutely not going to buff out, though, are the deep cuts Jason made in the front bumper when he went crazy, ramming right into that half-inch steel pipe-protector in the parking garage, a huge grin covering his face:

You can see deep gouges on both sides of the front bumper, though it’s worth pointing out that on the driver’s side, it appears the PPF may have sacrificed itself for the greater good, as there is still Merlot Red paint in the actual gouge:

On the passenger’s side, though, that paint is gone forever:

It’s a similar tale with the cheese-grating. As you can see, the PPF has been wiped away:  

But looking closely, there’s still some red in that cut:

On the unprotected side, though, that paint has vanished:

The door ding was interesting because it actually took a chip out of our paint on the non-PPF side, and just left a small divot on the driver’s side:

We’re going to learn a lot more about the magical powers of PPF by the end of this project, when we can take off the film and see the difference, but between the Police Slide results and the ones shown above, it’s become clear that the PPF side of our beloved Crosscabriolet is going to look better than the unprotected side. How much better? We’re excited to find out, but only after more grueling challenges for our quirky convertible crossover.

[Ed note: This post was done in partnership with XPEL, which provided support for this project and let us buy a Murano CrossCabriolet -MH]