Automotive and material suppliers have struggled for years with trying to produce quality, textured hard plastic parts with correct gloss levels and good mar resistance. Many times suppliers are at the mercy of the textures being chosen by OEM design studios. Some textures that are visually appealing may not perform well for gloss and/or mar. In the past, little was known as to what specific characteristics led to these performance limitations. The purpose of this paper is to identify the specific characteristics of automotive textures and how these characteristics affect mar and gloss on molded plastic parts. By analyzing these characteristics, designers will be able to create, or modify, textures that are both robust and aesthetically pleasing. Topics to be discussed include identifying contributing texture characteristics, discussing how these characters can be manipulated to improve performance and recommendations will be made as to how ideal textures should be developed in the future. In this work plaques were textured with nineteen different textures from three texture families. The plaques surfaces were glossed with a dull blast media and they were molded in two different materials, polypropylene and ABS. After molding these plaques, they were then glossed with a mid-level finish and they were again molded in the chosen resins. The molded plaques were then analyzed using three different piece of measuring equipment. A Bryk gloss meter was used to establish the measured gloss level of the textures. A five-finger scratch and mar tester was used to establish each texture's susceptibility to marring. Finally, a 3-dimensional scanner was used to analyze each texture's characteristics. A trained, experienced OEM craftsmanship representative also independently evaluated the molded plaques for mar severity and perceived gloss level and the findings were recorded.