Toyota Supra Tinted with XPEL Prime XR Plus

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My Supra gets park outside. Now that it’s summer time, it just gets beat down with sunlight. I have a front windshield sunshade and I protect the entire interior with various products but no doubt, the interior is taking some damage. It may look fine now but down the road, there will likely be some fading and possibly other damage. Because of this, I’ve finally decided to tint all the side and rear glass.

To do this, I headed to California Tint of Everett, WA. This shop works with a bunch of super high-end cars so I was comfortable with them working on my car. Another reason why I went with California Tint is that they are authorized installers of XPEL window films. XPEL is widely known in the window film industry and is among the best. They offer 4 different types of window film, the Prime CS, Prime HP, Prime XR and Prime XR Plus. Now, this is not an informational or advertisement video for XPEL so I’ll leave some links down below to where you can find more information about the various films. For the sake of time, I’m just going to categorize the films as standard and ceramic. The standard films reject 99.9% of ultraviolet rays. The ceramic films do this too while also rejecting infrared heat. The Prime XR film rejects up to 88% of infrared heat while Prime XR Plus rejects up to 98%. With each level of quality, the price increases, and in the case of Prime XR Plus, the price jumps quite a bit. I don’t want to give you any price quotes because this differs from shop to shop so it’s best to contact your tint shop for the most accurate pricing.

For this project, I personally knew that I wanted to go with a ceramic film for the heat rejection properties. I just didn’t know if I wanted to pay for Prime XR Plus. But I figured that because the Supra is likely a forever car or at least one that I’ll own for a very long time, I might as well pay for the best upfront and not have to deal with possible headaches in the future. It definitely helps that with XPEL Prime films, you are getting a lifetime warranty that covers defects such as discoloration, fading, bubbling, peeling, cracking, and delamination. Realistically, anything short of abuse will be covered for the life of the vehicle.

If you’re unaware, the Supra comes with some sort of tinted privacy glass from the factory. We tested it at California Tint and it’s rated at 77%. This means that whatever tint that you decide to go with, it will be slightly darker. XPEL offers Prime XR Plus in a few different degrees of tint. With all my cars, I have them tinted at 15% and that’s what I wanted for the Supra. But remember the factory tinted glass makes any tint darker so you have to go with a slightly lighter shade. In this case, I went with 20% tint and after installation, it sits exactly at 15% with the stock privacy glass.

To me, 15% is a good compromise. It’s pretty dark during the day and unless the interior is fully lit up by the sun, you still have to focus and really look in the car to make things out. At night, it is pretty much non-seethrough and looks black from the outside but still very visible from the inside. I thought about going down to 5% for this car because the murdered out windows look really good but it also looks super illegal. Not to mention that 5% tint is really dark and hard to see through from the inside at night.

So here is the final result. In my opinion, the Supra looks so much better with the tint. This is something that I should’ve got done from the beginning but better late than never. The interior will be better protected moving forward, for years to come.

Now if you’re going to get your Supra’s windows tinted there are a few things that I would suggest. The first is to get the installer to apply the tint all the way up to the window’s edges. Some installers like to leave a small gap of untinted space and it always looks really tacky. Second, remove the third brake light and tint the entire rear windshield. Luckily, Ryan the owner of California Tint also owns a Supra and reminded me of this. If you don’t tint under the third brake light, you’ll have a small section of clear glass that will really stand out.

If you’re interested in getting something similar for your vehicle and you’re in the western Washington area, definitely give California Tint a try. They did an amazing job and have really competitive prices even compared to some other shops that I talked to that uses inferior window film.

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