How To Safely Remove a Car Dealer Decal Badge From Your Car

Car dealer decals are a good way for dealerships to advertise, but they aren’t an ideal accessory to your car. Not only that, they’re a pain to remove too. If you want to spruce up your car by removing that ugly dealership decal, here’s how you can do it.

Prep Work

Before you actually remove the sticker from your car, you’ll want to clean the area around it. This prevents the dirt from around the sticker from damaging your paint when you clean the adhesive. A simple warm soap and water wash will get the job done well enough.

Removing the Decal

The trick to cleanly removing a decal from your car is removing it under the proper conditions. Any form of heat will help soften the glue and make the decal easier to remove. Depending on how tough your sticker is to remove, you may simply need to wait for a warm, sunny day. If the sticker is still too hard to remove on a warm day, you can use a hair dryer to heat the sticker and loosen the adhesive a bit.

Once the glue is loosened up, you can attempt to remove the decal. For the best results, do this slowly and carefully. If you can’t peel the sticker using your fingers, you can use something gentle like a piece of floss, a credit card, or a plastic spatula. You may need to spend a good amount of time removing small pieces of the decal, especially if you have one that’s laser cut rather than printed on a rectangular sticker.

For particularly resilient decals that still aren’t coming off using tools and heat, you can spray an adhesive remover around the sticker as you work to peel it. This allows the adhesive remover to get underneath the sticker and loosen the glue.

Cleanup

Removing the dealership decal from your car isn’t the only important part of the process—you also need to make sure you clean things up properly afterward. Leftover adhesive can attract dirt and lead to scratches in your paint. To prevent this, you’ll need to use something to remove the adhesive. While there are products made specifically for removing adhesive left over from these  types of stickers, such as 3M Adhesive Remover and Goo Gone, you can use WD40 as an alternative if you’re looking for something you might already have around the garage. Nevertheless, you’ll get the best results with a tried-and-true adhesive remover.

Dealership decals aren’t easy to remove, but it can be done with some effort. As long as you follow these steps, you’ll have your decal removed in no time.