100-Micron Against 80-Micron: The Auto Branding Material Question to Ask Before You Book (2026)

We have quoted auto branding in ten Indian cities for long enough to know which line of the proposal a client reads last. It is not the rate. Our hood rate is Rs.650 per auto one-time for 300 to 499 autos and Rs.630 from 500 up, and everybody checks that number twice. The line nobody checks is the material, and it is the one that decides whether the fleet you paid for once is still readable in month seven. What our rate buys is 100-micron rexine with UV-stabilised lamination. What the cheaper quote in your inbox is usually built on is 80-micron, and our own city pages publish what that does on Indian roads: fading and peeling within 60 days in Bangalore, within 50 days in Lucknow, and within 45 days in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Kolkata.

Put those windows next to the published life of the thing you are actually buying. A hood cover typically runs 6 to 12 months and a back panel sticker 4 to 6 months. A 45-day material inside a six-month plan is not a cheaper campaign. It is the same campaign bought four times, and the reprint is only the visible half of the cost. The invisible half is the weeks your fleet spends on the road wearing a peeling version of your logo.

This is the playbook for that conversation: what the micron figure means, what our own pages publish city by city, the arithmetic that turns any material quote into one comparable number, and the five questions to put to a vendor before the purchase order goes out.

What does 100-micron actually mean on an auto hood?

Micron is thickness, and nothing else. It describes the printed rexine or vinyl skin that goes over the hood, not the print, not the coating and not the glue. Thickness is one of three lines that decide how long a unit survives, and our city pages specify all three separately because the way material dies is different in each city.

The second line is lamination. Every city page specifies UV-stabilised lamination on the hood, with Ahmedabad calling for heavy-duty UV protection against a 45C season that holds for four to five months and Delhi adding a reflective ink treatment for the December and January fog weeks. The third line is adhesive, and this is where the cities diverge most: anti-peel in Bangalore and Kolkata, anti-bubble in Pune for the humidity swings under 1,400mm of Western Ghats rain, heat-resistant in Ahmedabad and Delhi, and anti-corrosion in Chennai for salt air off the Bay of Bengal.

The order in which those three fail is local. At the 90 percent-plus monsoon humidity our Kolkata page publishes, the adhesive gives way first and the page says so, describing adhesive failure and peeling within 45 days for the market-standard material. In Jaipur and Ahmedabad the ink goes first, which is why both pages describe fade rather than peel. A vendor who answers the material question with one number for a ten-city rollout has answered it correctly for one city.

One trap is worth naming before you read any quote. Our auto pages publish no GSM figure for vinyl or rexine at all, because GSM measures grammage and belongs to paper. It appears on our newspaper insertion pages, where leaflets are quoted at 45, 90, 120 and 170 GSM. If an auto branding quote comes back specifying GSM for a hood, that is a paper unit applied to a plastic product, and there is nothing you can check it against.

How fast does 80-micron material fail, city by city?

This is the table we wish more briefs started from. Every figure in the first two columns is lifted from the auto branding page for that city, which is the only place we publish it.

Read the second column as a spread rather than as a number. The same material carries a published life that moves by a factor of two across our own cities, 60 days in Bangalore against 30 to 45 days in Chennai, because the thing killing it is different in each place. That is the strongest argument we can make against buying one material spec for a national rollout, and it comes out of our own pages rather than out of a brochure.

Three cities are deliberately missing from that column. The Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune pages publish the spec we fit, 100-micron rexine rated for 48C in Delhi, for 42C Deccan heat in Hyderabad, and with anti-bubble adhesive for Pune's 1,400mm of rain, but none of the three publishes a failure window for the market standard. We could average the other five and print a number. We are not going to, because that number would be ours rather than observed, and the point of this post is that the figures you plan on should be checkable.

Those windows only become money at fleet scale. The smallest hood order our card accepts is 300 autos at Rs.650, which is Rs.1,95,000 one-time before GST and Rs.2,30,100 with it. Nothing on our card discounts a reprint, and there is no reason to expect one from anyone else: a second fitting is a second order at the same slab, because the cost is print plus labour either way. So a six-month plan carried on a material our Kolkata page puts at 45 days is not one order of Rs.1,95,000. It is four, and the second, third and fourth of them buy back weeks the fleet has already spent looking neglected.

Why is Mumbai the only city we quote 120-micron for?

Because 2,400mm of rain is not the same problem as 1,200mm. The Mumbai page specifies 120-micron rexine against the 80-micron standard, with waterproof adhesive rated for continuous heavy rainfall, anti-fungal vinyl coating and sealed-edge waterproofing, plus colour matching to Mumbai's black auto hoods rather than the yellow and green fleets elsewhere. The audit cadence changes with it: bi-weekly field audits from June to September instead of the monthly baseline.

The part worth noticing is the price. The Mumbai hood is Rs.650 per auto one-time and Rs.630 from 500 autos up, the same as Bangalore, Delhi, Jaipur and everywhere else we publish a card for. A heavier film, a different adhesive and double the audit frequency through the monsoon are absorbed into the published rate rather than quoted as an upgrade. If a vendor is charging you a monsoon surcharge for material, that is a commercial decision, not a technical necessity, and it is fair to ask them to show it as a separate line.

Chennai is the other coastal case and it is specified differently again: marine-grade at 100-micron with anti-corrosion adhesive and an anti-fungal coating for humidity above 80 percent, with audit frequency doubling to bi-weekly through the northeast monsoon. Two coastal cities, two different answers, both published.

This matters most on a multi-city order, because the material line is the one thing on our card that is not identical everywhere. The rates are: Rs.650 and Rs.630 for hoods, Rs.170 and Rs.270 for the two back panel sizes, the same 300 and 500 auto minimums, in all ten cities. The specification is not, and it should not be. When you brief three cities in one purchase order, ask for the material lines written per city rather than once at the top, because a single national spec means somebody has picked the mildest of the three and applied it to the other two.

What does a hood actually cost per auto per month?

Every material argument collapses into one number: rupees per auto per month of legible life. It is the only way to compare a quote built on a different film against ours, and both halves of it are published. Here is our own card converted into that unit, using the life figures on our service pages and a 30-day month.

All four rates are one-time and cover design, printing and installation, with GST at 18 percent extra and an auto-union fee at actuals in some areas. Nothing recurs, which is exactly why the denominator matters: the campaign gets cheaper every month the material survives, and stops getting cheaper the day it stops being readable.

Two adjustments belong in the same division before you compare anything. The first is the slab: crossing 500 autos moves the hood from Rs.650 to Rs.630, which is Rs.105.00 and Rs.52.50 per auto per month rather than Rs.108.33 and Rs.54.17, so ordering wider lowers the monthly cost of every auto and not just the bill. The second is tax: at 18 percent GST the Rs.650 hood lands at Rs.767 per auto, or Rs.127.83 a month over six months, and a 300-auto fleet lands at Rs.2,30,100. Compare landed against landed, or the cheaper-looking quote may simply be the one that left GST out.

Now run the same division on the quote you are holding. If a vendor will put a life in writing, the arithmetic finishes itself. If they will not, the material line is decoration. The table below is the ceiling an 80-micron quote has to come in under just to draw level with our hood, computed from our rate and the failure windows our own city pages publish.

Those ceilings are our arithmetic, not a market rate. We publish no 80-micron price because we do not sell the material, so treat the columns as a test you run on someone else's quote rather than as a comparison of two cards. A quote of Rs.300 per auto in Kolkata looks like a 54 percent saving against Rs.650 and, at the 45-day window our own page publishes for that material in that city, works out at Rs.200 per auto per month against our Rs.108 at the short end of a hood's life.

What five questions should you ask before signing?

Every one of these is answerable in a sentence by a vendor who knows what they are fitting, and unanswerable by one who does not. Ask them in this order, because each answer changes what the next one is worth.

What is guaranteed in writing, and what is not?

The replacement term is the sentence that turns a material claim into something you can act on, and the audit cadence is what makes it usable. Both are published per city, and both change with the season in the three cities where the weather does.

Here is what we do not publish, and what you should therefore not accept from anyone else without asking a second question. There is no laboratory test report behind these figures, no named film or ink brand, no accelerated-weathering certificate and no warranty document. The 6 to 12 month and 4 to 6 month lives are typical ranges from our own campaigns rather than a guaranteed service life, and the failure windows we print for the market-standard material are our own field observation in each city, not an independent study. If a competing quote arrives with a certified lifespan for Indian road conditions, the useful follow-up is which laboratory issued it and against which standard.

The other half of material life is the fitting, and it is easier to verify than the film. A hood is a curved surface with edges that lift, so a good sheet fitted badly fails at the corner months before the material would have given up on its own. What our pages publish on that is evidence rather than technique: photo-verified proof of installation on the auto hood branding page, GPS tracking of branded autos, and daily or weekly campaign reports, with the one-time rate covering design, printing and installation. Ask any vendor what installation evidence you receive and when, because a photograph of your own unit on day one is the only baseline an audit in month four can be read against.

The material lines your purchase order should carry

Six lines, and none of them is a price. If all six are on the document before you sign, the material conversation is finished for the life of the campaign.

• Print film thickness in microns, stated per format, hood and back panel separately.
• The lamination specified, and the local condition it is specified against.
• The adhesive specified, named against the failure mode in that city rather than in general.
• Life in months, written as a range, with the date the clock starts.
• The replacement term with a clock on it, and who decides that a unit has failed.
• Audit cadence, who performs it, and whether you receive photographs of your own units.

When you want those six lines quoted against a live fleet rather than argued in the abstract, our auto branding pages carry the rate card, the material spec and the minimum order for each of the ten cities, and a brief with a city and a quantity is enough for us to come back with the same six lines filled in.