The fastest way to make your car look older is not bothering with paint swirls and micro scratches. If you have got a deep scratch going right through the car paint, car paint repairs might be in order. If you have several deep scratches, it might require you to sand down your vehicle in order to get a new paint layer applied. Paint scratches may also damage your paint if they scratch the top layer of paint. Any type of scratch to your paint, be it a microscopic one (swirls) or deeper one (scratches all the way to primer), is caused when a solid, foreign object makes contact with the surface of your paint and is pulled through it over some distance by another object. Scratches in the paint caused by objects that are more abrasive, such as keys or rocks, tend to run deeper into your cars surface and are harder to smooth. Paint scratches are typically caused when another driver hits your car with his/her own.