Nissan Develops Paramagnetic Color Changing Paint

Like other auto makers, Nissan had a problem: some customers just can't decide what paint color they like, while others insist on an exact hue which is on some other dealer lot somewhere in northeast Nebraska.

Color choice is an inventory management problem for manufacturers and dealers. Frustrated customers often can't understand why dealers couldn't deliver the car they wanted, instead steering them toward a beige 4-door in the back row.

Yes. It's true. There actually are auto industry marketing experts who stay awake at night worrying about which color could unexpectedly loose market share and trash the value of existing inventory.

The ability to paint cars on the assembly line any color using precisely measured paint cannisters which feed paint robots is one key to the Toyota lean manufacturing system.

Using this system, cars go down the line in a series of unrelated colors.

Other builders still use big tanks with long hoses which require cleaning to change color. Cars are assembled in groups of 20 or 30 which go down the line as a group.

This old-fashioned batch processing is wasteful, expensive, and environmentally unsound.

Ruby Tuesday: Car Color Fads

Car colors are subject to marketing fads. Most recently, high tech hard-edged silver has been a favorite. Since the turn of the millennium, silver has become the world's most popular car color.

With nearly one-third of all vehicles in the world painted silver, it's getting hard to find your car in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

With US cars 22% silver, Japan 35%, and Europe a whopping 40%, the silver fad has probably peaked.

Auto makers have had this problem from the beginning, when Henry Ford I resisted painting cars any color other than black.

So Nissan engineers focused on eliminating the paint color problem altogether.

Nissan has developed new technology that allows users to change their car's exterior color with the touch of a button.

The new paramagnetic paint changes color when an electric current runs through it.

Iron oxide crystals embedded in a polymer layer change their internal spacing depending on the electrical charge. Widening the gaps between molecules changes the wave-legnths of light which are trapped or reflected: instant color.

The magic paint reverts to plain white when the electricity is turned off.

When this gismo is installed on every car, I won't be the only one lost in the parking lot.

Nissans with color shifting paint could appear as soon as 2010.

Critics and enthusiasts have lit up the blogo-sphere with ideas as to the effects of this new gadget.

Some see color changing as a temperature control system: select the light colors during hot sunny days and soak up sun in fashionable black in winter.

Some envision a problem for law enforcement when traffic offenders can easily revert to an inconspicuous shade after being clocked. Others counter that we are moving toward a totalitarian conformist future where car colors would project the caste status of owners.

Then there is the issue of static discharge. Sparks have been implicated in numerous instances of exploding gas stations. And what about the implementation of hydrogen?

Pundits have proposed security systems where touching the car electrocutes the offender.

Or the paint could "talk" to the remote key-less entry, flashing a unique color code rather than beeping or turning on headlights.

Now I can rest easy, knowing I'll never loose my car again.

Tuners and enthusiasts point out the potential for photo-realistic electronic custom paint. Imagine connecting the paint channel to the sub-woofer output on your ghetto-blaster, causing the entire car to color pulse to the tunes in hyper-color.

Dude, u gotta git this.

Others see the ability to change tint on the fly as a means to communicate in the road-rage freeway environment. Flashing could take on a whole new meaning.

But there is s new safety issue here: changing colors while driving (CCWD) could be added to the long list of illegal distracted driving behaviors.

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