The Greatest Automotive Scratch Removers of 2024

How We Tested Scratch Remover Kits

Lead tester Michael Frank has plenty of old and not-so-old cars where the paint is toast. His love of old rides puts him squarely in the camp of believing that just about any paint job can be made better and that polishers really can be very effective at restoring the epidermal quality of just about anything you drive. 

That all mattered for testing, too, because it meant he had a lot of varied paint to buff, from an old Honda Gold Wing from the 1970s to a Volvo P1800, to modern cars with metallic paint and plastic bumpers. A good polisher shouldn’t “care” if it’s painted plastic or painted metal, but modern cars and motorcycles tend to have more severely creased sheet metal and sharp angles can be hazardous to polish because you have to be careful with how much pressure you apply. 

We tested not just for how easy these polishers were to use, how quickly they worked, or how many steps were involved, but also for ease of use. How hard might it be to over-polish and rip right through the clearcoat, pigment, and bare metal? Fortunately, the answer is they were all fairly user-friendly.

Bottom line, we were shocked at how effective each was, period. You can take some really tired paint and make it sparkle with almost zero work, which makes grabbing a bottle of this stuff and getting to work a no-brainer.

Buyer’s Guide: How to Choose a Car Scratch Remover

Ease is somewhat related to effectiveness on these. The hand-applied products can be decent at removing hairline blemishes and spiral marks left by car-wash brushes, fingernails, door rubs, and other blemishes. If all you have are a few tiny key scratches around a lock, these are your go-tos. 

If you’re trying to go deeper to repair scratches caused by rock strikes in your bumper or hood that (importantly) didn’t penetrate to the car’s plastic or metal — but you can actually feel when you glide a finger over the surface — you want to go with a drill-buffer. We found them more effective at blending away the bulk of these kinds of scrapes. It’s also less fatiguing to use them because you’re letting the drill do the work, not your hands rubbing away for several minutes at a pass. 

Kinds of Scratch Removers

We tested two types of car scratch removers. There are rub-on ones you apply by hand and either let dry to a haze or ones that use a buffer that you attach to a cordless drill. But you can go farther. Several companies sell orbital polishers that offer two advantages: 1. The pad’s surface area tends to be larger. 2. The speed control of the orbital can be set separately, so you’re not trying to modulate it the way you do with the trigger of a cordless drill. Also, the angle of the design allows easier use when applying pressure to doors, roofs, and car hoods. 

If you’re really concerned with your car’s finish, that may be something you want to consider. Orbital polishers start at around $40, so they aren’t insanely expensive.

If you bought one, you could still use one of the polisher fluids we evaluated, such as the Turtle Wax Scratch Repair and Renew, which we found worked pretty well with a drill-based polishing pad. 

Getting back to what we tested, even the pads that we used with a cordless drill were pretty impressively effective. None more so than the 3M system where you very lightly sanded the affected area and then used the two solutions and pads in the kit. This hints at what more serious processes look like if you go the route of buying an orbital buffer, etc. It also tells us that you maybe don’t have to go all in unless you’re as OCD about having a really shiny car as we’ve now become.

How to Use Car Scratch Removers

No Sun, No Heat 

Where you polish your car’s battered paint matters. Never take on this job in direct sunlight, or even on a car in the shade with hot paint. It changes the chemistry of the polishing compound so it dries too quickly and turns what should be a wet-sanding sort of process into a dry one — and that can vaporize your car’s clear coat. (Thank us later: We tried polishing one car in direct sunlight just to see what would happen and it’s not only too abrasive, but the goop gets incredibly tough to move around, too.)

What they Don’t Do

Polishers essentially sand away some of the clear coat and a bit of paint pigment below that, then polish it. After sanding the scratch nice and level, you restore the remaining paint with a polishing chemical in the agent you’re applying. That said, we didn’t find that there was some miracle cure in a bottle and buffer that would restore rock strikes that went right down to bumper plastic or bare metal. For that, you’ll still want to seek the help of a professional.

Wash First

The other crucial detail here is that you want to work on a clean, dry surface unless the product instructs otherwise (as with the 3M, where you use the sandpaper on slightly wet-down paint). If a car is very dirty or the paint is especially haggard, you might want to use a clay bar on the car’s paint after it’s been washed and dried to pull out contaminants before trying to remove scratches.

Choose Your Polisher

Some hand-applied scratch removers worked really well for only micro swirls. But there was just no substitute for using the two buffers we tried that are meant for use with a cordless drill. That method removed scuffs and paint left by folks who “park by feel” in parking lots and curbside. As long as a scratch wasn’t deep into the car’s pigment coat, we could easily clean up mars and blemishes that we feared only a professional detailer could fix. 

Go S-l-o-w-l-y

Every polisher we tested worked better with light up and down, side-to-side passes using very light pressure, then pausing to review the work and wiping away the polisher residue to check our progress. The more light passes we made, the more the area improved. And it was almost addictive to walk the perimeter of every car we were experimenting on to see which scratches we could remove and how much shine we could extract. Yes, it was actually a lot of fun! All the cars benefited from removing the worst scar tissue and restoring some of their faded luster. 

Buy What You Need 

Does everyone need to go whole hog and get a buffer? Not really. If your vehicle is relatively new and you just have a few fingernail scratches, it’s easy enough to buy the cheapest polishing compound on our list and try it first. We were pretty amazed at how effective some of these were and how quickly they worked. 

But if you have that one spot with a big scuff or paint from another car on the edge of a door, you shouldn’t hesitate to buy a system like 3M’s. We don’t love how the buffer and polisher are packaged, but deeper scratches require a bit more surgery to remove, and it was well worth finding out. Plus, you can buy their fluids if you have a bigger job to tackle and then you’d have both the buffer and polisher sponges that come with that kit. 

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