2006 Isuzu Touch Up Paint (17 OEM Colors)

The 2006 Isuzu Vibe

By 2006, Isuzu was putting on a brave face with the Ascender and the i280/i350 pickups. Even though they were sharing DNA with their GM cousins, they went surprisingly heavy on the color options-our database is sitting on 17 different shades for this year alone. It was the height of the "lifestyle SUV" era, where you could get your work truck in a high-flash Copper Orange Metallic or a Yellow that could be seen from low earth orbit. It was a colorful "final lap" for a brand that spent decades defining "tough."

Paint Health Check

If you're driving a 2006 Isuzu today, you are living in The Thin Paint Era. By this point, the factory robots had been tuned for "efficiency," which is a fancy way of saying they figured out how to stretch a gallon of paint across twice as many trucks. This means the total film thickness is notoriously stingy. While the clear coats were technically more scratch-resistant than the stuff from the 90s, the "Robot Efficiency" meant there wasn't much meat on the bone. If your Superior Blue Metallic Ascender has spent its life outside, that thin clear coat is likely reaching its breaking point, and stone chips on the i-series trucks tend to go straight to the primer because there just isn't enough paint to stop them.

Restoration Tip

When you're fixing chips or scratches on this era of Isuzu, you have to respect the thinness of the original finish. Build your layers slowly; don't blob it. Because the factory paint is so shallow, a single heavy drop of touch-up paint will sit way higher than the surrounding surface, making it stick out like a sore thumb. Use multiple, paper-thin applications, letting each one dry before adding the next. This mimics the factory's layered approach and prevents you from having to do heavy sanding later-which is a gamble you don't want to take with clear coat this thin.