UK-POLOS.NET - THE VW Polo Forum

I thought they might be hard water marks, but I can't seem to clean them off. I have tried vinegar and chrome polish, but nothing seems to work. I haven't tried brute force as I am trying not to take the chrome off.

Can anyone tell me if this fixable? Or known defect. Or they all do that? Or any old posts I should look at.

The car is 2017 and front badge doesn't have this issue.

Sometimes water can get under the top layer of the badges and leave a milky appearance (white worm corrosion). Looking at your picture, it doesn’t look like white worm corrosion though, but looks as if a product used to clean the car might have reacted with the badge, damaging the top layer. This could happen if a strong / harsh cleaning product such as a strong traffic film remover has been used and / or left on too long prior to washing the car - leaving marks that look like water marks but are more probably surface damage where a cleaning product has etched the surface of the badge - similar to what you get from acidic bird poo if it’s left on a car’s paintwork for too long before cleaning off.

What cleaning products do you use to wash your car or do you take it to one of the many hand car washing places? Many of the £5 - £10 car hand wash places use quite high strength cleaning products to help them wash customer’s cars as quickly as possible as time is money to them and they want to clean as many cars in as short a time as possible. Those strong cleaning products will often strip off any wax or sealant protection on the paintwork, so it’s quite possible they could also cause cosmetic damage to items such as badges and other chrome or chrome effect trim pieces or plastic trim, especially if they’re sprayed on and left too long prior to washing / rinsing off. Black plastic wheel bolt covers also often react to unsuitable cleaning products - they discolour from black to a light grey; on VW’s, the plastic cover on the locking wheel bolt seems particularly prone to fading if an acid based wheel cleaner is used regularly - the early stages of this can be seen in the picture in this discussion thread over on VWROC.com

https://www.vwroc.com/forums/topic/2894 ... nced-this/

Alloy wheels can react badly to unsuitable cleaning products - the pictures at the link to this thread on Detailing World illustrate this;

https://www.detailingworld.co.uk/forum/ ... p?t=411756

I’d recommend always using ph neutral cleaning products and avoiding the hand car washing places if you use them. Oh, and never let a VW dealer do one of their free complimentary service washes on your car!

It is also happening to the rear VW badge on my wife's August 2015 VW Polo 6C, I have never used any aggressive cleaners on it and don't live in a hard water region, so I'm not sure what I can use to improve the look of that badge, as these are hatchback cars, in winter time salty water will get sucked up onto that area of the car, which is what I'm blaming for that external marking of the rear badge.

I use regular cleaning products. I never use the car washes mechanical or otherwise. They do a hand wash when it goes in for service. The car was an ex dealer. Autoglym, Meguiars last touch detailer and turtle wax. I have used a harder wax Chemical guys jetseal, I have never had problem with this on my other car which I have had 14 years now. I don't wax the badge, but they would be a bit of run off from the paint work.


@RUM4MO
I wonder if it could be the salt/grit they use. I would be surprised they can't stand up to 3 winters and I live in the south where we use less salt in the winter. It is pretty terrible for a VW to be honest. On my 2 Rovers everything corroded except the badges and they were both 7+ years old.

My wife's car was bought new and for some crazy reason I let them apply whatever paint protection that was current back in August 2015, the only product I've ever used to wash the car is Autoglym shampoo/conditioner and the car has always been garaged from new with the exception of when away from home. So maybe garaged frequently when wet and wet and salty but always washed with soft water.

So, yes I'm a bit annoyed as well though my 2011 Audi S4's badges are not much better and it lives most of its life sleeping in the garage!

So far I've avoided the temptation to try using chrom cleaner.

Edit:- the rear badge is available as a separate item p/n 6C0 853 617

Deadeye,

It would be helpful to us to know whether you believe this corrosion is happening from the outer surface of the badge downward, or whether you believe it's from the underside of the badge upward.

The salt used on roads (at least, for roads in the UK) is really terribly damaging stuff, both to vehicles and to the environment. There may well be a need to keep our roads ice-free in the winter months but chucking tons of salt down is paramount to spraying sulphuric acid on to the exposed components of cars and to anything else in the vicinity. Unfortunately, using salt is a crude but only solution until someone comes up with a better idea.

The only protective treatment I've ever applied to my 2017 Polo 6c and to former vehicles of mine has been turtle wax (or other good-quality wax). However, I use a well-known UK washing-up liquid to perform the pre-cleaning (very much diluted, of course). Never had a problem in using that liquid but I was once reminded that, in manufacture, that washing-up liquid was bulked up with the addition of salt. That's probably quite true but I always rinse the pre-clean operation with plain water then, after a leathering over, apply the turtle wax. Thus far, whenever I've waxed the Polo I've included the front and rear badges. They're unfortunately then quite a fiddly job to neatly get rid of the white residues, on drying.

Maybe for the same sorts of reasons, polishes, waxes and other treatments should be carefully chosen for their pH neutralities, as it's well-known that many of these car-cleaning products are acidic and are harmful to the finishes on alloy wheels, for example. I've always had my suspicions of Autoglym, for instance, and avoided it.

Could it be that due to the fiddly nature of cleaning the rear badge in particular, both you and others you've requested to clean your Polo have failed to apply any meaningful amount of protection on the front and rear badges, resulting in salt solution getting behind the 'VW' in the winter months and rotting the badge from the inside, out to the outside?

Do you know if the badge is separately removeable from the tailgate latch mechanism and therefore readily replaceable? Is the badge itself glued in place? If not, the only way of restoring the nice look of the badge would be the complete replacement of the latch mechanism, badge and all, which according to my workshop manual would be a fairly big job, and the replacement part would undoubtedly cost a king's ransom.

Not sure what the reason is for the deterioration of the badge. Reckon you have two choices, renew the badge completely, or tackle the existing one with product.

If you have access to a rotary mop, then I'd try a fine cutting compound such as Menzerna 203S. If you don't, try Autosol, applied on a damp microfibre cloth, then buff off.

I'll worn you now, someone has Plastidipped their rear badge white in this gallery!

Anyway, useful guide to remove. viewtopic.php?t=58278

It seems to me that the design of the tailgate latch and badge, in their entirety, can easily allow water - be it water used in the process of washing the car, rear screenwash, or polluted spray off the roads - to enter the annular gap between the tailgate hole and the badge and thence end up behind the badge. As far as personal investigation of the handle/badge goes on my own Polo, I don't think the handle/badge is hermetically sealed off from the tailgate's interior. Presumably, VW took account of this during the design of this part, and any water that gets inside the tailgate is meant to drain out? (I think there are a couple or more small drainholes in the bottom edge of the tailgate, are there not?). Maybe if these holes are instead plugged up or otherwise blocked, there's more of a possibility for condensation, and hence rotting, to occur on corrodable parts of the tailgate interior? Though made of a plastics material, that weblike 'handle' base on which the badge itself mounts may well tend to retain water droplets, even though it appears to be a very open structure. So, if those water/condensation droplets happen to contain corrosive salts of any sort, they'd rest against the back of the badge itself and marr it in time.

Although the spartacus68 pictures show removal of the 'VW' without the need to first remove the big interior cover-panel of the tailgate, I would suggest that this would be very difficult to do on any 6C Polo using a creditcard, as I can't honestly see that that or a similarly-fashioned tool could be inserted behind the top half of the badge - unless the top can rock toward you if the handle is left in the unlocked position? (Haven't investigated that factor yet). I've always assumed that the badge (the silver 'VW' and its black background) is effectively a one-piece plastic moulding, and therefore if you need to remove the 'VW' and the black background you have to remove the complete 'handle' first, by detaching the interior tailgate panel-cover. Maybe all VW badges are not the same? RUM4MO has found that the rear badge for 6C's is p/no. 6C0 853 617 and, looking that up, that appears to be just a one-piece affair.

Edit: Have just been to have a further play with my rear badge. I take back what I've said immediately above, because it seems to me that if you start the badge removal from the lower end of it, you can get more purchase on it, maybe even get a sharp knife to it, to start the levering off. Whereas, when unlocked, the lower half of the badge rocks towards you, the upper half rocks away from you (and this is irrespective of whether the fob-lock is on or not), so you can, in situ, only gain useful access to the bottom half rear of the badge-and-its-base. But my guess is that, once you're able to start the levering off at the lower edge, the top half may then come away as you'd wish. Looking behind the lower half, the handle cavity does, in fact, look quite well sealed (albeit I saw no rubber seal of any kind), so whilst water can certainly linger around directly behind the badge, very little water is ever likely to reach the interior of the tailgate. On my Polo tailgate there are just two drainholes at the lower edge, but they're plugged and painted over.

I had tried the Autosol but it didn't budge and also tried a a house hold product Brasso but you need to be careful as it can take the plating off to the plastic.

So I just tried to take the badge off, but cracked it . Which is annoying, but I was resigned to the idea I would have to replace it.

Running my finger nail across the lower right side of the "V", feels like hard water spots. But the vinegar would have cleaned it up. The discolouration at the top of the "V" this is no roughness. I would say the large holes (look like hard water spots) have punctured the outer layer and the smaller discolouration are reaction of the water getting in-between the layers.

I always park the car in the same spot at work, the tail always points almost directly south. Possibly a combination of salt, heating - freezing, every work day may have just done it. I don't recall seeing this last year, but they could have been microscopic. The only difference I had a water softener installed January this year, I now clean the car with soft water.

I'd personally never put Autosol or Brasso anywhere near plastics materials. Glossy-finished plastics will clearly suffer irretrievably if you do that.

Ah, so you cracked the badge trying to prise it off its base, then? I'm not surprised but I suppose that doesn't matter now, as I assume you'll just buy and fit a new one. I presume the badge itself is held on to its base with small press-fit clips of some sort?

Yeh, I found on my own rear badge - which admittedly hasn't had much on-the-road winter usage - some dried deposits of water, particularly on the top edge. These were on-the-surface blemishes and came off with use of a tiny amount of car wax and piece of rag carefully worked into the gap with a very small screwdriver blade. I think any sort of protective wax applied from time to time to the badge, especially to its edges, may well prevent the sort of thing you've now had happen. Perhaps from hereon you should make a point of waxing the badge at the start of every winter period, and then checking it in the Spring to see how it's fared?