CAN HAIL FLICK PAINT OFF WITHOUT DENTING
I have inspected hundreds of hail claims and I BELIEVE I saw this 2 or 3 times. What that means is I am not 100% sure it was from hail but I believe it was.
It would have to be pretty rare hail, but it’s not impossible. We usually think of hailstones as smooth, but if updrafts are strong enough and temps are warm enough, hailstones can keep getting kicked back up into clouds where they fuse with other hailstones. In the perfect conditions, this can give the hailstone spikes, which could theoretically knock paint off.
What would make this rare, however, is that usually fused hailstones are pretty big. When you hear “softball sized hail” it’s generally a bunch of hailstones fused together, like this:
If the hail were that big, your car would look like it’d been in a war.
To get the damage you got, you’d need to have the spikey, fused hail, but in very small sizes. I’ve heard of it happening, but in over 16 years of storm chasing, I’ve never seen it myself.