has anyone had paint issues.....i have a 2010 purchased in oct.2010 and paint is chipping off the vehicle

 

Rock chips are fairly common if that's what you are talking about.

 

is all I will say BTW, to the site

 

Welcome..........

Only paint issue I had was: some slight orange peel on the panel sides, easy cut-n-buff.. all better now..

 

The hood on these cars are chip prone, to the point that the car should have come with an invisa-guard film for the first foot or so.

 

Welcome to the site Mine came with a couple painted in flaws and the paint is thin my bestest friend for this problem is http://www.drcolorchip.com/ works very well

 

The paint is thin on HHR's, but thats pretty much the norm for all cars today. Paint is applied by computers, and not one drop more than necessary to cover, barely, ever gets applied. I had some body work done when the HHR was about 8 months old, due to accident. The repainted areas are holding up better than the original.

 

Because of EPA regulations, they don't use good paint anymore but body shops still do.

 

This is the real answer here. All cars today are suffering stone chip like they never saw before. Todays paint to meet EPA regs has to be a water based enamal.

The new paint may make a tree hugger happy but it is more prone to chips since it is more fragile. It has nothing to do with thickness or some of the other crazy issues.

Even the paint in the spray cans from the hardware is nowhere as good as it used to be.

The other factor is cars used ot have Chrome on the entire front end. It absorbed the damage and kept on going. Today most of the cars have painted front ends with nothing to protect it.

The HHR is worse as with the shape of the fenders and hood it has more exposed area to the front. So in other words you can chip the side of you hood as well as the top and front.

Try not to tail gate and it will help some but it is hard to avoid. I bought a soild color HHR as I knew what to expect and I can touch up a soild color pretty good. Metalics are difficult to touch up well as the metalic in the paint is hard to get the same as on the vehicle.