Hard ceramic coatings such as TiN and CrN are very successful and are widely used in improving the performance of cutting and forming tools, but they are less successful in providing protection for general machine components, such as gears and engine parts. The development of low-friction wear resistant coatings that can run dry or in a minimum amount of oil is becoming increasingly important to this industry. Two recently developed carbon-based coatings Graphit-iCTM and Dymon-iC, which are shown to exhibit very high sliding wear resistance and low friction in dry conditions, are compared to a CrN coating under oil lubricated conditions. Long term pin-on-disc tests using a chrome steel counterface ball were carried out on coated HSS test samples. All the coatings performed well at very high applied contact pressures, exceeding 1.5 GPa, but the Graphit-iCTM and Dymon-iC coatings also exhibited the desirable characteristic of protecting the counterface material. Reasons for this behaviour are discussed.