When I bought the car two weeks ago I brought it home and sometime within the next day or two I noticed that there was a scratch on the passenger door panel. Since I had already brought it home and hadn't seen it when I inspected the car at the dealership, I figured it wouldn't do any good to tell the salesman since he'd probably say that they couldn't be responsible for it since I'd already had the car for a few days and didn't point it out to them before I took it. I've had things like this happen to me before.

Anyway, it's not a huge deal so I didn't want to make an issue out of it (all my cars usually end up with a couple of scuffs on the dash and interior panels after a few years anyway....) but I'm just curious if there's any way to fix it. It's one of the textured surfaces and I remember in the past seeing all types of plastic and leather repair kits that had this kind of patch thing that would fix a scratch and mold itself to the texture. Is there anything like this that might work?

 

I know that if the "scratch" isn't very deep you can at least make it very hard to see by just wipping it down with a quick interior detailer or APC. Sometimes the things we think are scratches are actually just light scuffs from shoes or whatever

 

I had some scratches on the back of the seats that were superficial. I got some dark gray boot cream and applied it and then wiped it off. Looks pretty good. FWIW

 

I wrote into my deal to have some of the interior scratches on the hard textured plastic repaired or panels replaced. I figured I'd get new panels but the scratches were repaired. You can't see the scratches at all. The plastic isn't as smooth as the rest and kind of dry so I assume they sanded it somehow. Love to hear how its done, so sorry I can't help, but yes it can be done. Check with the dealership.

 

I forgot to post the update to my situation. Turns out something strange had happened to the passenger door and the dealer replaced the panel.

Here's the full version of what happened. A day or two after I had bought the car, I noticed that the speaker cover on the passenger door did not match the ones on the rest of the car. The rest were all black and the one on the passenger door was chrome. I also noticed the scratch at more or less the same time.

I called my salesman and told him about the speaker cover but didn't mention the scratch because like I said earlier, I had already taken the car home and thought they'd tell me that since I had already taken it, I could have done it myself. I also didn't want to start off my relationship with them by complaining about every little thing. Anyway, I emailed the salesman pics of the mismatched speaker cover and he ordered a replacement.

I took it into the service dept to get the cover replaced. When I dropped it off, I decided to mention the scratch because the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was going to drive me nuts.

The service advisor said he'd check with the sales manager to see if they could replace the door panel. A few hours later he called me and said that yes, the sales manager OK'd it and they would replace the scratched panel.

When I picked up the car a couple of days later, he then told me that in the process of replacing the speaker cover and the door panel, they discovered that the mechanism that moves the door lock button up and down was also broken and that even though the door locked and unlocked just fine, the button was stuck in the down position and would not come up. So, they ordered that part and would call me when it came in. I'm still waiting for it to come in.

Obviously something happened to that door. I'm starting to think that that door panel was not the original panel that was put in the car at the factory and somewhere along the line the original one was replaced with the scratched one that had the mismatched speaker cover. And during that process the lock mechanism was broken somehow.

Kind of disconcerting to find out that some mysterious event happened to my car between the time it left the factory and the day I bought it but the dealer is fixing everything.

I asked the service advisor if he had any clue what might have happened to the car and he said no. I think the sales dept might have some idea but they probably won't tell me. As long as they fix it I guess it's all good.