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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Just armchair engineering here:

It wouldn't be hard to make some thick foam mats with straps sewn to them that can be rolled out and fastened to cars in under a minute each. Maybe toss in a couple plastic strips to make it unroll itself like the reverse of a slap koozie. Weather forecasting is pretty good. It's not like you don't have decent warning. You can cover everything out back and leave the cars that are on display out front uncovered until the last minute.

Tossing a mat over a high roof van or large pickup wouldn't be easy but the hordes of crossovers could be well protected.

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OK, maybe it does almost sound feasible, but I wonder what someone with outdoor car dealership experience would say? Is this a practical idea? How often do you need to unroll those mats?

Where are you storing the mats also? I can't imagine that they'd be small, even rolled up.

Right, those mats wouldn't be small. They would need lots of storage area.

Maybe a few be stored, rolled up, under vehicles at the back of the lot that are less likely to be moved?

And the rest could be stored indoors. They shouldn't be heavy, so maybe they can be stashed in the ceiling, or somewhere high up out of sight?

-Wouldn't making them inflatable solve much of that problem?

You could even offer a deluxe version with a CO2 cartridge.

This would also help with snow in the winter! I have to imagine it is a lot of work clearing snow off of cars for test drives, if you could just roll most of it off that would help!

Foam would suck up water unfortunately. It'd almost have to be something that was waterproof, dried quickly, and could be stored compactly.

Closed-cell foam is designed to prevent this problem, but at the cost of being stiffer and heavier.

You made a good point, anyway. Foam could absorb water, and air, and get dirty, and smell bad.

If it was low-cost enough, I could imagine it lasting a few months at least! I don't know if hail is a year-round problem or not however

I had this idea. I had a new car in 2014 and I had to park it outdoors for awhile while I was working on a different car in my garage. Anyhow, I didn't want hail damage so I put a car cover over the car, then piled a bunch of cardboard on top, and then threw another car cover over that. It worked until it got really wet, then I had a ton of soggy cardboard to deal with. But it worked as far as protecting the car from hail goes.

I was musing at the time why someone on Amazon wasn't selling some kind of hail protection padded car cover.

I have tons of great ideas, but I never connect on them. Then I watch other people make a fortune off that same idea. Shrug...

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