Steyer Automotive Panel Wipe – Product Review

Preparation is everything. It doesn’t matter how good you are at a job, if you don’t prep, your good work will quickly come undone. And never has this more been the case when it comes to car bodywork. Prep is the key to success if you’re painting or even cleaning a car. And it’s that latter option that brings us to this Steyer panel wipe. We needed to clean parts of our car thoroughly, and we needed there to be no old product left before we went on to protect said parts with fresh product. The only question is, can the Steyer panel wipe do the job well? Well, we ordered some to find out.

Get your Steyer panel wipe by clicking here.

The Product

Steyer is a UK-based automotive and vehicle paint manufacturer that claims to be the leading supplier for the UK. Certainly, a look around the company’s website suggests that it caters to every paint and refinishing need. Paints, primers, equipment, guides, custom colours, consumables – the list goes on. Steyer clearly is a one stop shop for this kind of thing. And because of that, Steyer’s people seem to understand that prep is 90% of the job, and so offers a range of products to ensure a perfect finish every time. The panel wipe we have here comes highly regarded, and is seen by many professionals as one of the best on the market. It’s also versatile, which is why it’s of use to us for this test.

The Test

How can we test panel wipe if we’re not painting a car? Well, very simply, actually. The job of panel wipe is to remove grease, oil and silicone-based products from surfaces so that your paint sticks. It also cleans the surface so anything else can adhere, be that decals, a wrap or in our case, fresh cleaning product. The problem we had was on a spoiler, a mass of black plastic that has clearly been subject to all manner of waxes and sprays over the years. Much to our chagrin, coating it with a new protectant after washing left a horrid, mottled look. This is the new reacting with the old. We needed to get shot of the old, and Steyer’s stuff is what people suggested. So here we are. 

The Result

The job was simple. The car was already clean, so we just needed to get the old products off. The spoiler is a satin finish, smooth not textured. We applied some Steyer panel wipe to a microfibre cloth, then wiped it over the spoiler, giving it two slow and steady passes. The panel wipe evaporates fast, so you can go over it a couple of times without issue. It lifted the old waxes and sealants off with ease, leaving a clean, uniform, non-mottled surface. We let it fully dry for a few minutes and then came back and re-coated the spoiler with – in the interests of control – the same stuff we had used prior (Aerospace 303). We left it for a couple of hours and, well, no mottling, no weird bleeding, just a nice, clean, uniform black. Brilliant.

The Verdict – 4 out of 5

This panel wipe impresses. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that expensive – £10.95 for 500ml – and it clearly does the job very well indeed. The product itself is brilliant, but it does lose a star for the bottle in which it is supplied, due to it being so flimsy. Going off the solvent-based smell, the bottle isn’t all that secure, either. Some reviews report leaks, but we didn’t get that, thankfully. So if you buy it, decant it into a better bottle (though as it’s meant for the trade, maybe that’s the expectation?). Bottle aside, it’s a great product and the adhesion of our fresh coat of sealant goes to show that this Steyer panel wipe does indeed remove all the old waxes, oils and other contaminates.