This review is for the silver T1-size cover for a small truck. It goes on a 2022 Nissan Frontier crew cab with a 5’ bed.
If you’re like me, shopping for a good car/truck cover can be a frustrating experience. For instance, the cover I’m replacing had a bunch of 5-star reviews, but after less than a year of intense sunlight had deteriorated to the point of leaving a substantial film of “glitter” on my paint job every time I used it. The glitter washed off, but it was annoying still. The canvas – if you can call it that – had rotted through in places and the straps were ultra cheap. It had been rated 5 stars.
Can you trust the reviews? Well, on the one hand, you kinda have to. What other recourse do you have? On the other hand, people will say anything just because. On Amazon, there can be thousands of five-star reviews for a given cover; you buy that cover and it ends up being a one-star PoS. You go outside Amazon, onto the internet “streets” so to speak, and you’ll find that all manufactures claim to be the best and their websites offer plenty of 5-star reviews to back that up. What’s a normal person to do? Well, I guess you try to find the reviews where the writer of the review has taken the time to provide you with a lot of product info initially and then does a follow-up down the road to let you know how long the thing actually lasted. This is my aim. I will write a good primary review and then do a follow up comment down the road when the cover actually fails. Also included throughout this review are some tips on the things I’ve learned while undertaking my quest to find a decent car/truck cover at a reasonable price. Also, this initial review has been purposely delayed. The cover has actually been in use now for 3 ½ months. I wanted to allow some time for the cover to settle in on its new home before I reported to you how things were going. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning . . .
My Ezyshade came with a spare buckle and strap, a patch kit for a poke-through antenna, instructions, a 90 day fit warranty and an 18 month product warranty. The cover itself comes heavily vacuum-sealed, resembling a large, silver alien prune. Why silver? For me the purpose of the cover is for UV protection, mostly. I live in Arizona at around 5000 feet in elevation and the sun is intense. Many of the dark-colored vehicles I see driving around town have some pretty good oxidation going on with the roof and hood. I definitely want to avoid this. Silver is the best choice for reflecting sunlight, including in the UV spectrum. You can disregard the comments that compare silver car covers to oven tinfoil that will “heat up” your car. Simply take a mirror – which is nothing more than silvered glass – and point it at the sun. How much light is being reflected away as opposed to say, a piece of brown or green canvas? You be the judge.
Carefully cut open the packaging, remove the cover and take it to your truck. As you straighten it out, you notice the thickness of the canvas. Didn’t the description say it was 10-layer? You can’t remember. It seems more like two. Nearly all car cover advertisements claim their product is 10 layers, and they likely are in that magical world of consumer marketing where fudging is expected. Conceivably, when they go to spray the canvas with nanometers-thin coatings of whatever they spray it with, they count each pass as 1 layer. But who knows. For us normal people it’s 2 layers. The best car cover I’ve seen so far is on my wife’s SUV and it seems like it is only 3 layers. It’s a California cover and has been going strong for three years. But I assume you don’t want to spend hundreds and that’s why you’re reading this review. Anyway, the top layer of this Ezyshade is reflective and seems sturdy. The bottom layer isn’t real felt, but is soft enough to not scratch paint. There are no side mirror pockets to help orient the cover. The paperwork says that sizes C and T don’t have them, which in my opinion is slightly bogus. Some manufactures claim that mirror pockets merely add another avenue for water to leak in, so it’s better to just do without. In my experience, there’s no such thing as a truly waterproof car cover anyway, so how important is an extra side mirror seam? Sure, the cover might be waterproof initially, but in the real world, it might be asking a lot for it to remain so. Not even my wife’s cover is still waterproof and that’s the cover that I compare all other covers to. But we will see with the EZshade. My question in the meantime is what exactly are they implying when they advise you to never cover a wet car? If the cover isn’t really waterproof to begin with, how can you prevent having a wet car covered? But keep in mind that if a cover lets water in, it will also let water out, so don’t panic and think that you have to go uncover and dry your car after every rain. Besides, most covers are water repellent, which is good enough for me and my not wanting to spend a fortune. By the way, this cover, the Ezyshade, is waterproof in its early stages--except at the seams. Time will tell.
If you haven’t oriented your cover yet, find the yellow “Front” tag on the inseam in the front of the cover. It’s difficult to find though. Better is to just find the zipper, which is always on the driver’s side in any cover. Roll it out and work it on the truck. The fit is good but slightly snug across the back bumper. This is acceptable in that it’ll keep the cover on the truck when it’s windy. It could be a problem though in that the material might eventually weaken and tear. There’s no way to know other than letting time do its thing.
Let’s look around for issues. You might notice where the cover lays atop the antenna and you don’t like it. Cars and trucks these days have several different antenna schemes; this happens to be a fin on the roof. The fit over the fin isn’t tight at the moment, but you might know from experience that under certain circumstances it could get tight, and with the rubbing in the wind, eventually will wear a hole in the cover. What to do? Cut an 8 inch length of rubbery pipe insulation, the kind you wrap around external plumbing to keep it from freezing in winter. I use 2 ½ inch diameter insulation. Wrap the length you cut in a micro-fiber cloth. On or two wraps is enough; it’s only to protect your paint job. Make sure to have where the wrap ends opposite of the slit in the insulation. Zip-tie both ends of the insulation to secure the cloth in place. Again, make sure the ends of the zip ties (the part you’re going to trim off) is opposite of the slit in the insulation. Trim the zip ties. Cut a slit in the cloth where the slit in the insulation is, about the length of the antenna fin you are covering. You are done. This appliance of your own making should fit perfectly over your antenna fin, thus protecting your cover.
What else? Ah yes, the bed of the truck. Sure, the cover fits almost perfectly over the bed opening right now--but wait until it rains. A little depression will form, slowly growing while you sleep. In the morning, you will have a canvas-stretching swimming pool in your truck bed, thus fulfilling one of the certain circumstances mentioned earlier, namely putting pressure on the cover where the antenna fin is and leading to a tear. The only way to avoid having this accumulation of water happen without poking a drain hole in the cover itself is to in some way crown the cover from the underside so that the cover is higher than the surrounding bed walls. There’s a number of ways to do this. You can bridge the opening by cutting a 2x4 to run across the top of the bed. Make it as tall as you want by attaching blocks on the ends. You’ll have to dull or pad any sharp edges. You can use a height-adjustable tripod set up in the bottom of the bed. Pad the top of it, if needed. Finally, the last and easiest way is the way I use: a cheap plastic height-adjustable folding table. Mine has a 28” diameter top. It’s light weight, portable and easily placed in the bed. Just raise the top three to four inches higher than the surrounding bed walls and your swimming pool issues are over.
What’s left? The straps. They are good quality and you might use them because of the wind. But when using the center strap, how do you feed the end of the strap underneath the truck to the other side? Here’s one way: Cut a 1x1 inch wooden stick off at 40 inches. A couple of inches from down from one of the ends of the stick, sink a screw about three quarters of the way into the wood. This is to keep the strap from slipping down on the stick after you tie the strap to the end of the stick and fling or forcefully push the stick underneath the truck to the other side. You can now go buckle the strap.
So how is this cover holding up after three and a half months of use in intense sunlight and a medium amount of rain and wind? The honest answer is great. The silvery finish shows no sign of deterioration. It is still waterproof and thus, dirt/dust proof. There is no tearing across the back bumper. My impression so far is that this cover is of good quality and worth the price. Time will tell, though and I’ll follow through with this review down the road. If the cover is still in good shape, I'll add another star.
Lowell W. Wilson
Buyer Whoever