I worked in shipping and post production for Toyota for years. You’d be surprised what is considered passable in their books, I’m sure it’s similar at other companies. We’d commonly be told that even though we were at greater than the standard of “3 feet or 30 degrees” it didn’t matter because the defect was “customer acceptable anyway.” Some of us joked that 3 and 30 was a rough guideline.

I saw cars with bumpers with almost no paint, fisheyes, you name it. That doesn’t even count the ones our guys wrecked. On site body shop took care of almost all of those. Except one that got wedged in a train car and took about three hours for a wrecker to pull out. That one got crushed.

One black car I’ll never forget had such a nasty spot right above the wheel going up to the c pillar. Another guy looked at it and said no way they will take that back. So I messed with it until they couldn’t deny doing something and made the call. Was total bs to go out as it came off the line. Got the car back and they got the spot out, unless you looked from an angle and saw the huge swirl marks from the buffer...