Well long story short, the rear end on my car has seen a lot of action. I backed into a 2 foot fence on the original oem bumper, which got replaced and repainted.

The colour on it always looked a little darker. I brought it back to my repair shop and they told me that painting on plastic will always show a different color then on the metalic park of the car.

Then I got rear ended by one of the administration at my school. new bumper, new paint, and this time I asked him if he could try an compensate... didnt make a difference.


Is there anyway I can order a bumper from somewhere that uses the factory paint? My car is 2 years old so there might be some fading with the rest of the paint, but this is driving me nuts.

Any help on this would greatly be aprieciated.

 

You didnt' say which color, but I bet its silver. A guy on here talked about how hard it was to get the paint to match on a bumper repair but the paint shop finally got it right the 2nd time. The problem is not the paint source, but how the paint is applied.

The bumper covers all come unpainted so no you can't order one already painted.

 

I just bought my 05 TL 6MT about a month ago (they still had one on the lot with 75 miles on it). I noticed a few things weird about it just the other day. When I open the trunk, the seam where the bumper meets the rubber is curled out. I'm talking about the plastic. I don't know quite how to explain it. It is the first thing you see when you open the trunk. It's the part that is right above your knees when standing looking into the trunk. If you follow the bumper up to the black rubber seal, the plastic right under the seal is curled back. You can actually see through to the ground when you look through the separation between the bumper and black rubber seal. Is this normal? It sure doesn't look like it.

Also, I let a friend drive my car in the evening while I drove behind. I noticed that the passenger side tail light was slightly less bright compared to the drivers side tail light. It's like part of the LED panel is out. Then, I just looked today with a friend in bright sunlight and noticed that the rear bumper is a slightly different silver color compared to the metal. Mine is also silver.

I was reading your statement above that the color is very hard to match when repairing. Is the color supposed be slightly off even from the factory? I'm starting to think that my car got hit and they repaired it before delivering to me. Anybody have any comments?

 

I have an '06 and I noticed the same 'curl' when I picked the car up at the dealer after having the parking sensors installed. I took it back and asked the service writer about it. He insisted that it was normal.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. It doesn't really bother me that much and everything lines up correctly when the trunk is closed. I guess it really isn't that big of a deal.

Do you know much about the rear tail light assembly? Did you understand what I mentioned about this above where the drivers side tail light looks like a part of it is not working? I'm thinking a bulb is out but I thought the whole unit had to be replaced because it is LED, not just a standard bulb.