Auto Skins - digital clothing for your car

from Inventors and Remarkable People (112 articles)

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Auto Skins - digital clothing for your car

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Those possibilities are endless and the technologies are readily available to do just that, in quite remarkable detail. Toyota showed its POD a few years back which eventuated in the company patenting a car that will display how you’re feeling, by wagging its antenaau or arching its eyebrows with different coloured lights to signify different emotional states.

The ongoing trend of expressing one’s individuality on the roads

As the automotive industry has evolved over the last 100 years, this trend towards personalisation has been gradually increasing to the point where it is currently expanding at breakneck pace.

When Henry Ford set up his production line and revolutionised the automotive industry, you could buy have any colour car you wanted as long as it was black. The reason was that it took weeks for the paint to dry before advancements in paint chemistry by DuPont yielded the Duco lacquer paint which cut the process of drying from weeks to hours and enabled General Motors to become the first to use other colours on its fast moving assembly line in 1923.

As colour choice became available from all auto manufacturers, naturally enough, the incumbent black maintained a healthy lead for a long time in the popularity stakes, but inevitably other colours came to the fore.

World War II put a big dent in the availability of colour, and there were still issues with some colours (notably red) which caused the pigment to fade until the mid to late the late fifties.

The colour white became “the new black” in the sixties as fleet sales grew and was the most popular colour for several decades prior to the turn of the millennia. Du Pont reports “basic colour family popularity showed evolutionary change in 2000. As forecast, white, a perennial leader, has been displaced by silver in both Europe and North America. The exception is American luxury vehicles in which fine mica pearls have given white new interest. In North America, green has given way to blue, a favourite in Europe, and yellow has emerged as a top 10 colour.”

Though silver maintains an overall market share advantage across all models and makes, there are still different colour preferences depending on the vehicle size and style (luxury, sports, SUV), and different geographic and cultural markets vary dramatically in their colour choices too, as can be seen from the accompanying charts.

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