New technologies drive the future of automotive coatings

The new developments in coatings and specially designed coatings for EVS are opening up new avenues for the automotive paints and coatings market

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The oft-quoted statement of Mr Henry Ford in 1908: The customer can get the Model T painted in any color he wants, so long as it's black!” sounds humorous today. But Ford was serious when he said it. Ford thought that black car paint was the only practical automotive paint for the Model T, as it was a coating both durable and cheap. In fact, the black car paint was not automotive' paint at all, but just the existing paint technology available at that point in time: a paint based on natural linseed oil resin as the binder. Oil resins cure through oxidative crosslinking. This means the paint takes a long time to dry. Ford's black paint was applied by hand brush in multiple coats, a process that, took almost a week to complete. This caused terrible production bottlenecks for Ford's innovative mass production process and jammed the assembly lines. This process bottleneck was the motivation for the first paint specifically developed as an automotive coating: DuPont's Duco' paint. This new coating technology reduced the painting and drying time from many days to a few hours.

This was the first example of how industry needs have drove the advance of automotive coatings technology. Since then advances and innovations in automotive coatings technology have continued unabated.

It was not until the 1950s that the next major automotive coatings advance occurred. By then, the automobile was no longer just a means of transportation. Cars had now become a personal showpiece that owners wanted to flaunt. That meant that the coatings had to look better and accentuate the new curved styling body designs of the times. the use of thermoplastic acrylic lacquers. For this, the use of thermoplastic acrylic lacquers was introduced.