We have a beater car for my son when he starts driving in a few months. The clear coat is faded and peeling in some areas. The quote for a shop to fix it is nearly half the value of the car itself. Has anyone used these wipe-on paint repair things? My ads are overwhelmed with them now that I've searched this, but I want some personal experience to back up all the crazy claims.

Car cloth, Poppy's Patina, etc

Thanks for the post. I have the same situation and will look forward to read your reply's.
My problem is just the black hood, the body shop wants $1200 to re-paint, I'm leaning towards wrapping it myself for about $125.

Hood or fender?

Consider going to a salvage yard and buying a hood with good paint if you can find one.

The old hood will come in handy when a deer waltzes out in to the road.

Won't work with the roof unless you have a Tesla.

Wraps do not selectively fill scratches, divots or patches of missing clear coat. Also $$$$.

Para's truck was doing this.

We had to sand and paint all the sections.

If it was easy, everybody would drive beautiful cars and know Karate.

Painting is expensive. The prep work to make it look good is even more expensive.
There is no cheap & easy fix. There might be a cheap or easy sort-of fix, but there's a reason you're bullshit detector made you think twice.

Wraps won't do much for the looks and might fail if the paint it actively failing. If you're holding onto something & it falls off, you fall off too.
I have no experience with Poppy's, but it sounds too good to be true. I've seen WD40 make shit paint look nice for an hour or 2.

My 1st truck had a faded hood, fender and door, probably from someone trying a cheap fix. It was a beater & I treated it as such. I wouldn't spend money on making a beater look nice.
Does Maaco still offer the $500 paint job?

$500??? What a rip off!

It's a Beater. Why bother with painting it. When I was young I had a Chevy Monza that had the ends of the front bezel secured to the fenders with Duct Tape. The mounting tabs were broken and without the duct tape the headlights would fail about every 4 weeks from the bouncing. If I could find an intact front bezel it would likely have cost 200 dollars and about 4-6 hours of work to swap the old for new. For a 600 dollar beater I thought whats the point. The duct tape was good for about a year and was pretty cheap to replace.

I had a black 2011 Toyota that paint was thin on. Not a fix but black colored wax made a temporary improvement and it was easy eonough to do.

Wet sand peeling clear coat until down to paint (also removes oxidized paint surface). Rattle can automotive clear coat on areas you sanded. Wet sand with finer 1500-2000 grit newly coated area. Do more layers of clear coat, and wet sand again until looks passable. Finally, polish newly coated area. Won't be perfect, but it'll look far better than peeling white patches especially from a distance! Obviously not near as good or long lasting as original clear coat or a professional job, but it doesn't cost hardly anything beyond lots of elbow grease. On a used beater, it's good enough.

This is not hard, it does require elbow grease patience and some time watching videos so you can fully understand the process.

I repainted the hood and fender on my parents beater and it came out perfect, total cost was about 600 dollars including the filler primer, color match paint and 2k clear coat, orbital polisher and all the tools, sand paper and polish pads.

Its best to do entire panel rather then spots. It's easier and comes out better. It is too much to explain in a post, watch some videos and decide if its something you can or want to do.