Brand profile
Mothers
Independent Californian car care company sold through mass retail, whose CMX line pairs silicon dioxide with titanium dioxide and is unusually candid about what its own durability testing has and has not established.
- Registered name
- Mothers Polishes Waxes Cleaners, Inc.
- Headquarters
- Huntington Beach, California, USA
- How you buy it
- Direct to consumer
Mothers gets closer than any other consumer brand here to answering “how long does it last” honestly, and the answer is that they do not know yet either.
Background
An independent company in Huntington Beach, California, sold through mass retail — O’Reilly, AutoZone, Advance Auto Parts, Walmart and Canadian Tire, per their own FAQ. CMX is their ceramic line, formulated with silicon dioxide and titanium dioxide rather than silica alone, with no wax in the formula.
One ownership point worth stating affirmatively, because the paperwork invites the wrong conclusion. Mothers safety data sheets are hosted by SEM Products, which has been a PPG subsidiary since 2018, and that arrangement has repeatedly been mistaken for an acquisition. It is a distribution partnership dating from 2019, and both companies said so on the record at the time: asked directly to squash the rumour that SEM had bought Mothers, SEM’s marketing director answered that both companies remain wholly independent of one another. Mothers is not owned by PPG.
The most honest durability answer in the category
Their FAQ asks “How long does it last?” and does not give a number. Instead: durability testing is still ongoing, the product has outlasted all of their tests so far, and one test car has been through more than a hundred automatic brush washes plus daily ocean salt air with little to no degradation.
That is not data and it is not a method — there is no schedule, no instrument, no reading you could check. But it is a description of real testing with stated conditions, and it is the only such account we found from a consumer brand. It also declines to convert an unfinished test into a marketing figure, which is exactly the discipline this category lacks.
A correction to the record
Third-party reviewers widely attribute an “up to 1 year” claim to Mothers for CMX. We read both the product page and the complete FAQ, and that phrase appears on neither. If a database ingests review sites, it will inherit that error.
The published guarantee is a satisfaction remedy, not a durability promise: liability is limited to replacement or refund on return of the unused portion with proof of purchase.
What Mothers publishes about itself
- Safety data sheet
- Only via a resellersource
- Publishes any test data or method
- Yessource
- Publishes an ingredient breakdown
- No
- Written warranty
- Limited
How we checked: Fetched the CMX product page and the full CMX FAQ. Mothers-authored safety data sheets exist but are hosted on their distribution partner’s domain and on retailer domains rather than in a library on mothers.com, and we could not locate a sheet for the CMX 01024 SKU specifically. The test-data finding is qualified: the FAQ gives a narrative account of ongoing durability testing with stated conditions, which is more than any other consumer brand here publishes, but it is a description rather than a method or a dataset. Assessed August 10, 2026.
Sources
Everything on this page about the company traces to one of these, with the date we read it. Brands edit their own claims, so an undated citation is worthless.
“This powerhouse combo provides ultra long-term protection from the elements and relentless water beading”
“CMX® Ceramic Spray Coating durability testing is still ongoing - currently it has outlasted all of our tests. For example, one of our test cars has been run through 100+ automatic drive-through brush car washes, as well as daily ocean salt air exposure.”
- PressDistribution partnership announcement, establishing that Mothers remains independentRead August 10, 2026