Yeah, I’ve tried several touchless washes in my area after I got full XPEL PPF and OptiCoat ceramic . . . .
I got the Xpel Ultimate Fusion which has ceramic integrated into the film. I don't know how much of that is real protection or just marketing puffery, but the self-healing certainly seems to work. If the carwash is putting any swirls on the car (and newer carwashes usually don't), they are gone by the time I finish drying the car off in the hot sun. And you're right; the car takes a
lot of drying, whether with a hand wash or automated wash.
If I do wash the car at the house these days, I use the no-water Optimum OptiClean. It leaves the same deep, mirror-like finish on the car you are getting. The car's over two years old, and after an OptiClean I still occasionally have people approach me to ask if it's a custom paint job.
There's a lot of road and building construction going on in southwest Florida, and the roads are crawling with dump trucks. I know the car is getting hit by sand or tiny rocks that I don't detect because the windshield is accumulating very tiny chips, and something hit one of the front aftermarket laser detector/jammers enough to chip it and knock it loose. But the only thing the film is showing is one very faint 3"-long scratch on the hood that is too deep for the self-healing to handle. It's only noticeable when I'm drying the car, and even then I have to look for it.
A couple of months ago, someone swiped the top of the driver-side rear wheel well as they were pulling out of a parking space next to me. It left a couple of dents in the fender and scuffed and partially peeled away the film. A "dent doctor" was able to repair the dents, but the film protected the car's paint. With a new piece of film, there is no sign the car was ever damaged there. With the Zenith Red, this is very important, as red can be a tricky color to match as time passes, and the tinted clear coat Lucid uses with that color adds to the trickiness. (This incident increased my confidence not only in the Xpel film, but also in the robustness of the Lucid paint job.)
I have had prior cars ceramic coated with OptiCoat. The longest I ever owned one with the ceramic coating was six years, and the finish still looked like new. However, Optimum says not to put OptiCoat through an automated carwash. This is the first car on which I'm ever used PPF, and Xpel says automated carwashes are fine. I will never own another car without it.
