Cool concept, looks super slow relative to exciting assembly plant paint though. Upside is you can buy a plaid car from the factory, downside is it’s +$5k and an extra month lead time.
Considering there's already 6 month waits on new cars, I'd happily throw in an extra month if it meant I got to use an online editor to design my own paint job.
I think that is relative to custom paint vs existing manual methods. That i would agree with, i just don’t see this replacing single tone paint methods. Which likely wasn't why it was built, so not sure why i'm pointing that out haha.
It saves money in air compressor energy costs, but the article glosses over how long this takes compared to traditional methods. If it takes 10 times as long to paint a car this way then you have to replicate it 10 times in the factory to maintain the same rate of production which could very easily end up costing more.
On the other hand, masking is a pain in the ass and takes a lot of time so this could end up being faster all around so long as you're comparing with complex multi-tone paintjobs.
Off the top of my head: tailors embroider the clothing they make for customers and luxury clothing companies like Luis Vuitton engrave the customer's name or a message on products like wallets. IIRC even Apple used to engrave custom messages on some of their products for free.
Custom embroiders/engraves are basically a way to reduce the second hand market as fewer people want to buy a luxury product with someone else's name on it.
I would think that if they were really trying to check the secondary market, they’d allow engraving for iPhones. Surely that’s by far the one that cuts most deeply into the bottom line.
Looking at the orange base-coat in the video, I'd suggest it saves money versus hand-painted custom paint jobs but as every surface of the car (inside doors) are orange, I'd say that was applied by the traditional robot painters (with HVLP guns).
