Commercial fleet vehicles are every bit at risk on the road as your own passenger vehicle. Sometimes, they do not have to move at all because other drivers will hit them, ding them, scrape them, scratch them, and smudge them up with paint that is not the same color. If you take your fleet vehicles into an auto body and paint shop, scrapes, scratches, and smudges from other vehicles getting too close and just scraping past are actually considered commercial fleet repairs. These cosmetic repairs are managed in the following ways.

Smudges

Smudges of paint from another car, or the rubber smudges from another vehicle's black rubber fender, are probably the easiest to remove. Most of these can be removed with a little buffing cloth and some car polish. Others can be removed with rotary tool and a buffing disk. 

Scratches

Scratches are a little more difficult to remove as they are actually scratched into the vehicle through its paint job. If the scratches are deep enough, the technician will need to remove the panel of your fleet vehicle, strip the paint, buff away the scratches, repaint the entire panel, and coat it with a protective coating before putting it back on your fleet vehicle. When there are more than just a few of these scratches, or the scratches cut straight through the panel to the inner frame of the vehicle, you may want to skip fixing the scratches and just replacing the panel entirely.

Scrapes

Scrapes happen when another driver does not take into account how close he or she is when he/she pulls into a parking spot or tries to sneak through a tight alley. The end result is this long, streaky scrape pattern of your vehicle's paint on the other auto and that auto's paint creating a similar pattern on your fleet vehicle. These are harder to remove than smudges but often less difficult to remove than scrapes because the damage is usually completely superficial. 

The technician will use an approach similar to the one used for scratches, except that he/she will not have to strip the paint from the panels entirely. A light sandblasting or a coarser buffing disk should be effective. If the paint job underneath the scrapes is slightly damaged because of the scrape removal, the technician will lightly buff over this area, apply a light layer of fresh paint, and then seal it over again.

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