If your so worried about damaging your EVO's paint. Then perhaps you ought to not drive it during the winter season. Go get yourself a beater. Drive the beater in the winter. And leave the EVO for the spring+summer..

WM

 

First off I shouldn't have to worry about it. There is obviously a design flaw and no where in the owners manual did it say driving in the winter will chip your paint in the same spot on both sides of the car. I drive the same roads to work as I have driven for 10 years and never had an issue with any other car. I could understand your statement if it were random rock chips but this is not random.

 

**** happens

 

You live in California. The roads are obviously 100 times better there. You should come to the MW and see what happens to your car even with the mudflaps. Its ridiculous. They pave all side roads with gravel/tar in my town, and every time it rains it all comes loose and gets all over the main roads.

 

I feel your pain man.

 

My best friend has a GTR, and he plans on putting on some low profile front flaps to. So does this mean that the GTR is also not well designed? I think not..

 

Is this not a problem with all evo's, their damn paint is wafer thin. Horrrrible!

 

Any car with low profile tires, and a low stance. Will get F_cked up driving on im-perfect roads, conditions...

WM

 

I have 4000 miles of Ohio winter driving with no paint issues whatsoever (yet anyway). I have no aero kit, but I do have mudflaps on the front. I've also been running 225 size winter tires, so hopefully my luck doesn't run out when I put the stock tires back on once it warms up...

 

A lot of Evo owners buy Evo's so that they can drive them in the winter...us Northern Dwellers aren't blessed enough to be able to drive a RWD year-round, we need another car, be it FWD or AWD, yet we yearn for a sports-minded car that will carry us around no matter the whether, the Evo is a perfect combination of that....getting a winter-beater in order to allow a perfectly capable winter car, to sit until the spring-summer is ridiculous don't you think? A better alternative would be for Mitsubishi to paint the friggin cars better!

 

Perhaps these people should raise their EVO's higher. Since they bought it to drive it in the snow, mud etc.. Because its not going to be perfect with the stock height with those conditions.. My friend with the GTR is getting chips on the back sides to. I dont think this has anything todo with bad paint...

WM

 

So people riding stock height getting chips should buy coilovers, invert them, and raise their car?

The wheels sticking out further than the sides of the rear fenders does have a lot to do with it. The thinness of the paint also plays a role. Other cars throwing rocks back are going to chip your front bumper. This can happen anywhere, any place. It is especially going to happen in the MW where we have the freeze/thaw that tears apart roads causing potholes and gravel to be spread everywhere.

Someone needs to test the thickness of the paint.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/0...ness-test.html

You can use that or something else. There's probably a meter out there that can actually show you the thickness of the paint, but that's probably going to cost a bit.

I would like to see the thickness in different sections of the EVO vs other vehicles. I already know the paint is more thin than my previous cars, and more thin than that of my RSX. I just want to know by how much.

 

I was actually thinking the opposite. People need to buy coilovers and lower their cars. It would be shooting the rocks up along side the rear doors and over the wheel arches.

Also inverting the coilovers wouldn't make them raise the car silly, it would just make them inverted. Think about what you said, you don't make no damn sense.

 

It is very possible to drive a RWD car in the winter. I would infact argue for RWD over FWD. I had a 240sx for two winters with an LSD and that thing got around better than anyone I knew with FWD. And it was far superior in the "fun" category.

P.S. Sorry for going OT, back on topic I would be pissed too. I think 3M is the best option.

 

Lol...I didn't think about what I was saying when I meant invert the coilovers. I just meant raise instead of lower.

Oh, and I doubt the rocks would go up over the wheel arches.