Vinyl costs almost as much as paint, that's just the reality of it. There's about $4-600 in just materials and then ~50 hours in labor on a car the size of an FX.
Plastidip is cheap because it's cheap - it looks cheap and lasts maybe 5-6 months before looking like crap. That's why you always see guys switching up the colors, you pretty much have to keep repainting. I have a vinyl wrapped car that's going on 2.5 years without issue, Plastidip would never come close to that.
The only advantages of Plastidip are that anyone can spray it (vinyl takes some skill), it's reversible (so is vinyl), and it's cheap. But to dip your entire car, you're still looking at probably $500+ between getting a sprayer and a few gallons of dip. The materials are about the same cost as vinyl, there's just a lot less labor involved and much less skill needed.
If you still want to do it, it's your car...I would say go look at some dipped cars in real life. They always look decent in pictures, but every dipped car I've seen in real life has looked bad. There is a weird rubber texture to them since that's what dip is, and the finish just looks off.
This. I get people telling me that dip is the future, and that new products like RAAIL and HALOEFX are going to take over and kill vinyl wrap. They tell me I wasted 3k on my wrap when I could have dipped the car for less than 1k. I've heard it all.
I've seen pictures all over my social media about crazy dip jobs that look exactly like paint, and the dippers come all over your pictures and shit on wrap jobs.
And after all of that I have even called shops in my area who charge money for dip jobs and asked them to show me a flawless dip. They couldn't do it. I asked them to show me a dip job after a winter or 6 months of use so I can see what it looks like, they couldn't do it. They all use the excuse that "Oh dip is so cheap that we just re-dip all our cars constantly just to change it up". That's utter bullshit, they keep re-dipping their cars because this stuff doesn't last.
If you want to be changing the colour of your car every 6 months to a year, then go ahead dip it. But if you want the finish to last Vinyl is the only way. My car has now been wrapped for almost 2 years. When I clean it, it still looks 95% as good as the day it left the shop, and my car has been through 2 canadian winters of me driving it up to the mountains, in snow, rain, salt, tons of road trips, etc. I have not been easy on this wrap, and it has held up phenomenally to my abuse.
Also Dip cannot be repaired if one panel gets damaged. I don't care what the person tells you, it will never match close enough for anyone to say it is acceptable. Whereas with vinyl regardless of what colour you have chosen, just make sure to purchase an extra 10 or 15 feet, and you can re-wrap panels and they will always match within an acceptable tolerance.
I am currently re-wrapping three panels on my car due to my window having been broken and some damage that was done to the car. With dip I would have been shit out of luck, I would have been paying to re-dip the entire car.
Also keep in mind because of the commercial uses for vinyl (aka advertisements and stuff), Insurance actually recognizes vinyl wrap, and if the wrap gets damaged insurance actually pays to re-wrap the damaged panels. Here where I live they DO NOT pay to re-dip any portions of the car, as they do not recognize dip as anything.
