Inferior RikeCool Clarity from Kah Motor

Most people will try to negotiate some freebies with their new car purchase. One item that often gets packaged together is solar film installation. Solar films are designed to tint the glass and reduce the amount of heat absorbed by the car’s interior. Given Singapore’s hot climate, this is a very practical add-on that is often sought after by many car owners.

Not all solar films are equal, of course. Some brands are reputable, some others are not so. Of course, there can also be cheaper brands with good specifications, high quality films. When Kah Motor packaged a RikeCool Clarity with my new Honda Stream, I thought it should be a reasonably good film.

But alas, I eventually found it was not so.

The RikeCool Clarity film offered by Kah Motor is a special arrangement they made with RikeCool. RikeCool themselves do not sell this film to their own customers. The Clarity film is somewhat “low quality”. The film on the front windscreen and front passenger windows have visible light transmission of 80% and infrared rejection of 30%. The films on the other windows have visible light transmisson of 50% and infrared rejection of 30%.

The glass tinting or shading effect aside, infrared rejection of 30% is extremely low. In fact, the people I spoke with at RikeCool say that the Clarify film is simply a UV filter, not a solar film. The Clarify film rejects 99% of UV, just like most solar films. But its 30% infrared rejection is extremely low compared with 80% or so for most other films.

The difference in the infrared rejection can be felt very significantly when your car is exposed to direct sunlight.

UV rejection is important too. It protects the interior of the car. All the other RikeCool films are also equally good at UV rejection (99% UV rejection). In fact, all the other solar films from other brands to double up to provide UV rejection. So it is not as if the RikeCool Clarify from Kah Motor has some special advantage over other films.

In the end, I got the Premier 85 film installed on my front windscreen and front passenger windows, while the remaining windows had Premier 28. There hasn’t been really a lot of hot sun lately, but my subjective feeling is that my car does feel cooler than my previous Altis installed with Huper Optik films (but I don’t remember exactly which model of the film).

If you are offered RikeCool Clarify by Kah Motor, and you’ve already signed on the dotted line… there is still hope. You can make arrangements to “upgrade” the film. Call RikeCool directly to find out the details.