[Jeff Higgins]

My younger son bought a wrapped 2003 M3 many years ago. That should have served as a big flashing red light...

The wrap was a really pretty blue, original paint was silver. The wrap started to deteriorate after he had owned the car for about a year. It started looking like it had black mold on it, for lack of a better description. So he had it removed by the same shop that had wrapped it and, of course, a lot of paint came off with it. The post-wrap paint repair cost more, I'm sure, than the wrap had cost.

It got worse from there. The Carfax was clean, but it turned out the car had been "washed" through a non-reporting state. The wrap turned out to be more or less the "wrap" on a laundry list of shoddy body repairs, including some structural. The end of it all was the front right suspension carrier assembly essentially separating from the inner fender and frame rail, thereby totaling the car. He sold it to a buddy, it's now a fully caged and braced race car.

He was young, it was a dream car. Five years of fun ownership before the gremlins started to manifest themselves. Expensive lesson learned, though. He will never buy another car that has been wrapped. Big warning flag now. What else was done half assed?

So, yeah - race cars, commercial vehicles, maybe a temporary wrap if you're gonna do a Gumball or something. But as an alternative to paint, on something one intends to keep? NFW...