The tools are made of fairly soft plastic so as not to scratch them. So if you try to use only the tips of the tools, they will bend and possibly break. The key is to keep working the tool in the crack as you pull the panel out, and to use multiple tools to separate the pieces of the panel as you work around the edge of the panel. With their help I removed my Kia's center console in less than a minute and had absolutely no damage to the hard plastic of the console or the softer plastic of the rest of the dashboard.