Should You Buy A Hood Protector (aka Bug Shield) For Your Tacoma?

Buying a Toyota Tacoma was a smart decision. Protecting that investment is also a smart choice. Purchasing a hood protector (aka bug shield) for your truck? Not quite as obvious. There are definitely benefits, but are they worth the money?

Benefits of a Lund interceptor bug shield for the Toyota Tacoma

On the positive side of things, a hood protector will keep your Taco’s front end looking great longer by protecting the paint against rocks, gravel, greasy, bugs, and other road hazards. Additionally, many people like the customized sporty look and the do-it-yourself easy installation.

On the negative side of things, hood protectors don’t completely protect the hood. If you buy one of the fancy aerodynamic protectors (like the $65 Lund model shown above), you’ll do better than the old-fashioned “blade” type protectors that didn’t have any sort of aerodynamics at all. That aerodynamic shape helps use the air stream passing over your truck to deflect rocks and gravel…but it’s still only a small piece of plastic. Hood protectors can’t (and don’t) stop everything.

Weathertech makes a no-drill, inexpensive (about $75) bug deflector for the Tacoma. Click for more details.

Still, a hood protector guards one of the most abused parts of the outside of your truck. Winter driving (when gravel and sand are spread all over the roads) can nick and scratch your paint job in no time at all, doing hundreds of dollars worth of damage in a single commute. Since the front end is so obvious and viewable, nicks and chips can spoil the whole look and value of the vehicle.

Hood Protector or Touch-Up Later?

Keeping your truck in the best possible condition for as long as possible is good business sense. When the day comes to sell or trade your Tacoma, the better it looks, the more you can expect to make on it. A hood protector is an inexpensive way to help the front end stay fresh and scratch-free.

Alternatively, you can try and touch-up your vehicle prior to trade-in or resale. If you pay a professional to touch-up your truck, you’ll spend as much as $200, and depending on the amount of damage you may find that the touch-up makes the hood (and bumpers and grill and any other painted parts) look as good as new. If you try and touch-up your truck yourself, you might not be happy with the results (read more about why you should never use touch-up paint that comes in a bottle).

Personalize your Tacoma with a hood protector. AVS bug shield shown, which comes in smoke, clear, and even chrome (click for more details).

The other benefit to hood protectors is that they can add a sporty, personalized look to your vehicle. It was the Germans who first started putting protective “masks” on their Porsches, and that high-end designer look caught on across the vehicle industry. Today, you can buy hood protectors that come in all kinds of colors and patterns – you can get camouflage, patriotic color schemes, even an inexpensive plastic hood protector made to look just like chrome, etc.

Hood protectors are easy to install too – you don’t need a mechanic. Most of the hood protectors on the market are “no drill” install, and almost none of them require any sort of cutting or fabrication.

So, to answer the question of hood protector or touch-up, why not both?

What do you think?