BEST CAR WRAP IN SAN DIEGO by Car Audio City

You may want a car wrap, and not even realize it! Every day, more drivers in San Diego are learning that the benefits of a vehicle wrap go well beyond commercial graphic applications. Though automotive wraps intended to generate publicity are, by design, the easiest to spot, the best application of a vinyl wrap may to express personal style, or even to preserve the value of a vehicle! There are many reasons to seek a car wrap in San Diego — here are the best!

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Vehicle wraps for advertising

The most common use associated with an automotive wrap is branded advertising. Most of us have seen such vinyl wrapped company cars, vans, and trucks: they drive down the highway, wrapped in corporate colors and logos, effectively advertising a business even as the vehicle goes about performing a company’s business! This remains a superb use of the automotive wrap concept, and practical, especially for a small business. But there are other uses of a car wrap that prove just as practical, even as they present a subtler and more stylish facade!

Vehicle wraps to express yourself

Using a car wrap to advertise has obvious value; using vinyl wrap as a mode of self-expression is priceless. Though many people still associate automotive wraps with logos designed to attract attention to the vehicle’s commercial activity, a broad array of vinyl wrap options put myriad customizable design elements in the hands of the vehicle’s owner. Which means your wrapped ride looks less like a company car, and more like a one of a kind road machine. Maybe you’d like your car to have a glossy lustre? Or maybe, you’d prefer a matte finish? 

Both options of vinyl wrap are available, in a wide assortment of colors. You can even take these concepts further: an automotive wrap to give your ride a chrome-like shine, or give the car’s surface the appearance of brushed metal. Vehicle wraps make it incredibly easy to personalize a car, giving it a distinctive look you won’t see at the dealership. Creative car owners may use automotive wrap to create a two-tone appearance, or even employ a special vinyl wrap that will make your car glow in the dark!

Car wrap vs paint job

Why seek out a vehicle wrap when you could just paint your car a new color? Well, beside the expanded range of customizable options just mentioned, there’s one excellent reason to choose vinyl wrap over a new paint job: it costs significantly less! Want another? It takes considerably less time to apply an automotive wrap than it does sitting around waiting for paint to dry.

Better yet, a vehicle wrap actually protects your car’s existing paint job, preserving the eventual resale value of your ride. Not only does the vinyl wrap protect underlying paint from getting scratched or chipped, it provides protection from the elements. Most importantly in sunny San Diego, it provides UV protection, ensuring the paint remains clean and bright beneath the car wrap.  And, given a vinyl wrap is easily, and 100-percent, removable, it’s a cinch to maintain a car with the stylish look of your own choosing, then remove the automotive wrap and present a perfectly preserved, more conventional-looking vehicle to its next owner.

What Are The Best Vinyl Wrap Brands?

At Car Audio City, we source several top vehicle wrap brands. Each provide an abundance of color and finish options, along with performance warranties. The best choice will usually come down to the preferred style choice of our customer.

3M Wrap Film Series 2080

This range of wraps offered by 3M best illustrates how many types of finish may be applied by a vehicle wrap. Even if black is your color of choice, you’ll find myriad options, including black with a glossy finish, gloss metallic, brushed metallic, satin, and several different shades of black in a matte finish. Those looking for more dynamic visual effects may opt for a selection of neon colors, iridescent pearl finishes, or the perpetually-enigmatic carbon fiber look.

Avery Dennison SW900

Avery Dennison produces some of the longest-lasting vehicle wraps on the market. In addition to various levels of gloss, matte, and brushed metallic finishes, the many diverse color options in the line include shiny chrome finishes in multiple colors, including blue, red, violet, and a stunning black chrome. If you’re out to truly make a statement, several colors are also offered in a sparkling diamond finish, and if you can’t settle on a single color, you might be in the market for two! Avery Dennison’s shade-shifting Colorflow Vinyl creates the illusion that a vehicle is shifting between two different iridescent colors, including from red to gold, gold to silver, and a truly futuristic green to purple.

Orafol 970RA

Boasting the widest variety of vehicle wrap options, Orafol offers colors you won’t likely find elsewhere, including a few distinctive and unlikely hues, such as mint, saffron, and beige. However, the Orafol line is at its best when presenting more dynamic color combinations and effects. For example, some Orafol vehicle wraps are modeled after the translucent coloring of gemstones, including amethyst, anthracite, and aquamarine. Most arresting are the many multi-color shift effects! Unlike other options, Orafols shifting color patterns are nondirectional, leading to a more flexible application of iridescent color schemes. With ultra-compelling color pairings such as red/orange sunset, turquoise/lavender, lightning strike yellow/gold, and a positively shimmering black/gold, these vinyl wraps will make your ride look like it’s moving even when it’s standing still.

Car Audio City offers the best car wrapping Installation in San Diego

If you’ve decided you’re in the market for an automotive wrap, whether for style or publicity, contact us in National City. We’ll make sure you get the best vinyl wrap your car deserves. Give us a call today at (619) 474-8551 for a free quote.

Car Wrap Frequently Asked Questions

  • A professionally installed vinyl car wrap may last up to five years, or even longer under the right conditions. However, there are several factors that may shorten the lifespan of a vehicle wrap. To extend the lifespan of a vinyl car wrap, it’s important to hand wash the vehicle with nonabrasive soap, and to avoid high pressure washes. A poorly installed car wrap may bubble, crack, and peel prematurely, so proper installation is key to optimizing the lifespan of a vehicle wrap.

  • For an average sized vehicle, a basic vinyl wrap may cost from one- to three-thousand dollars. For larger vehicles, and more complicated, custom wraps, the cost may be higher. Conversely, the cost of a partial wrap, covering specific parts of a vehicle may cost less.

  • Installing a vinyl wrap on your vehicle creates the opportunity to improve its appearance, as well as the potential to add custom graphics. Custom graphics may be used to personalize a vehicle (think flame decals, or two-tone fades), or to advertise a business with logos and marketing details. Even without graphics, vinyl car wrap provides an easy, low cost way to change a vehicle’s color and sheen, for example a black carbon look, or candy apple red with a chrome finish. A car wrap may be worth it just for the added resale value of your vehicle: a vinyl car wrap will preserve the condition of its original paint job, and the vinyl wrap is easy to remove prior to resale.

  • One less obvious, yet visually stunning use of vinyl car wrap to emerge recently is called a chrome delete. This very much in-demand style of vehicle wrap focuses on a car’s chrome trim — typically found on the car’s grill and door handles, and likely framing its windows. Chrome is a classic car surface, which comes out of the factory shiny, silver, reflective, and hard to miss. However, it doesn’t always convey the most stylish appearance and inevitably dulls over time. By applying a chrome delete, you may match or contrast these surfaces to the car’s paint job, or to its complementary, whole vehicle wrap.

    For example, on a black vehicle, a black chrome delete allows door handles and trim to blend in seamlessly, creating a sleeker, more refined all black appearance. You might do the same matching approach to a white vehicle — or better yet, apply a black chrome delete to create striking dark accents that create more pop than silver. The aesthetic possibilities of a chrome delete are endless, with the added benefit that the vehicle wrap protects the chrome surface from losing its shine or suffering corrosive elements, including exposure to San Diego’s ocean air and year round sunshine.

  • A professional paint job, using durable, auto quality paint, starts around two-thousand dollars for a compact car, which will prove twice or more the cost of an equivalent vehicle wrap. For bigger jobs, including larger vehicles or contoured sports cars, the savings may be less, though when it comes custom vehicle wraps with graphics, a traditional paint job can’t compete.

  • An untreated vinyl car wrap may fade over time due to prolonged exposure to direct sunlight. To get the most use out of an untreated vehicle wrap, it’s best to park the vehicle in an enclosed garage or covered parking space when not in use. That’s why, in sunny San Diego, it’s recommended to add a laminate coating to provide UV protection.

  • Though a vinyl vehicle wrap won’t scratch nearly as easily as a vinyl record, on its own, it will be pervious to hard scrapes. Along with UV protection, this can be mitigated by adding a laminate coating. Opting for a laminate treatment will protect against unintentional scuffs and scratches.