This New Car Paint Acts As Air Conditioning

Britain’s just managed an entire week of warm, summery weather, which means plenty of us have finally been putting our cars’ air conditioning systems to good use. It’s undoubtedly a nice thing to have on hot days, but it does mean making sacrifices in areas like power and fuel consumption. Nissan, though, is working on a potential solution.

The Japanese manufacturer has been trialling a new kind of exterior paint that significantly increases the radiation of heat, helping keep things nice and cool both inside the car and out. It’s been developed with Radi-Cool, a company specialising in such things, and inevitably, there’s a bit of a science lesson to sit through here.

The paint contains synthetic ‘metamaterial’ particles that allow it to counteract the way surfaces normally react to heat. The first reflects the sun’s rays, but the second, which Nissan calls “the real breakthrough”, actively counters them by creating electromagnetic waves, redirecting the rays back into the atmosphere.

How does this work? What do we look like, physics teachers? The results of the experiment speak for themselves, though. Nissan has been trialling the paint on a fleet of vans used at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. Being a vast international airport, it has plenty of flat, open expanses that are exposed to lots of direct sunlight, so it’s an ideal place to try it out.

So far, the results have shown a reduction of up to five degrees Celsius in interior temperature, and up to a huge 12-degree drop in exterior surface temperature, on vehicles parked in the sun for a long period.

The paint’s development is being led by a very clever man named Dr. Susumu Miura, a senior manager of the Advanced Materials and Processing Laboratory at the Nissan Research Centre. He points out that pre-cooling the cabin like this significantly reduces the amount of time you need to run the air con to get comfortable.

"This is especially important in the EV era, where the load from running air-conditioning in summer can have a sizable impact on the state of charge," explained Miura. While it’s still in the testing phase for now, Nissan hopes to one day offer the paint for special order, initially on commercial vehicles.