Restoring car plastic headlights / tail-lights

Well I picked this up today. Meguiar's PlastX. Clear plastic cleaner and polish. Both headlights had done a bad fade, and one was even a bit yellow-looking and foggy. I was a bit skeptical about these products, and Meguiars sell a full restoration pack that was more expensive, and looked pretty involved. The PlastX was pretty expensive at $27 or so a bottle.

I'd already cleaned the car earlier in the day. Using an old clean woven collared shirt, I applied dabs of this in relatively small circles with a bit of rubbing action, then both clock-wise and anti-clockwise to a thin film. Left it to setup and start drying, then buffed the headlight with a microfibre cloth (well polished then buffed). Just as you would with a car wax/polish really, but with a bit more forceful rubbing action. This resulted in some light yellow/brown left on the initial woven material, which was the oxidation/dirt contamination coming out.

I was blown away by the result, was far better than I had expected. The headlight was immediately cleared, and looked near new. Did both headlights twice, then the tail-lights (which were in much better shape). The result looks like new.

So for removing oxidation and cloudiness from non-coated plastics, I can highly recommend this PlastX stuff. I also used it on some other acrylic I had and a motorcycle windshield. It is great on things like plastic headlights to bring them back to near-new. It is more of a cleaner however, than a polish, it cannot remove light to deep scratching unfortunately, you would probably require something a bit more specific for that, and a lot more elbow grease to get a perfect result.

Overall 9/10 for Meguiars however for a regular faded headlight scenario (non-coated). It is a pretty specific product however, you can't just go dabbing it all over the car, it is for those specific types of plastics and that's about it.