You've seen it in parking garages and budget DIY installs: patches of missing coating right where the tires sit. That's hot-tire pickup, and it's the single most preventable floor coating failure.
The chemistry
Modern passenger tires contain plasticizers — softening agents that keep the rubber pliable. When you drive home on a hot summer day and pull into the garage, those tires are warm and the plasticizers are near the surface. If your floor coating has a low glass-transition temperature, the plasticizer migrates into the coating and creates a bond. When the tire cools and you back out, it pulls the coating up with it.
Epoxy-only finishes are especially vulnerable. Most residential epoxy coatings have a glass-transition temperature around 40–55°C — well within what a sun-baked Idaho driveway can produce.
Why polyaspartic doesn't peel
Polyaspartic topcoats have a glass-transition temperature above 80°C. At that threshold, the plasticizer migration that causes hot-tire pickup simply doesn't happen at residential temperatures. The chemistry is incompatible with the failure mode.
That's not marketing — it's the reason we can offer a 15-year warranty that explicitly covers hot-tire pickup. We're not hoping it won't happen. We know it won't.
The prep factor
Even the best topcoat fails if it's applied over a contaminated or poorly-ground surface. That's why we diamond grind every slab — not acid-etch, not power-wash. Grinding opens the concrete pores and removes any surface laitance, giving the epoxy primer a mechanical bond that can't be pulled up from below.