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Gloss Plastic Could Eliminate Auto Painting
customs writes "There is a new plastic out from GE that covers plastic surfaces with a really good sheen. It's more resistant to scratches and random chemicals compared to conventional paint. It's actually a .5 mm polymer called Sollx; the Segway was the first semi-mass-produced product to use it, it has slender two tone fenders. Kinda cool. Auto painting is the industries largest manufacturing expense, and this could be what they're looking for...as soon as the price comes down."
Finally I'll be able to crash into my buddies without having to pay for repainting my car each time I do so! :D
See my blog for my free opinions.
Does using painted sheet metal offer any kind of added structural strength to the car? Or is it so little that a strong frame with a polymer outside would do as well in a crash?
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Haven't you seen the TV commercial with the out-of-work auto painting robots playing cards? It's been airing for weeks.
Would look cool with a window and neon lights.
Ñ'
What are the affects of the sun on this plastic. Because of the construction of most polymers, ultravolet radiation ussually has terrible affects on them. And how do you wax a piece of plastic? Will the whole world suddenly be driving Saturns?
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
The real question, of course, is when this will be available for PC cases.
I know nothing about CDs or plastic, so correct me if I'm way off base, but "resistant to scratches" sounds like it'd be good for CDs/DVDs?..
At the bottom of the article, it states that the coating doesn't fade:
It never fades. Sunlight's ultraviolet rays trigger a chemical reaction in the Sollx film, forming a protective outer coating that won't decay.
I'd be more concerned about scratches -- how do I touchup a film?
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
add this to the Ideas tha GM has for future fuel cell cars design and it looks like fuel cell cars might be cheaper than cars today!!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Has given us Teflon, Kevlar, Lexan and host of other trademarked (but quality) materials. The impact of this tech tends to be below the radar of the average person, but is vastly important in the cost and quality of manufactured goods. The use of other materials such as titanium, aluminum and magnesium in objects traditionally made from steel or die-cast alloy has given us lighter and stronger engines, laptops and spacecraft not to mention medical devices.
Metal dents, and when plastic doesn't bounce, it cracks. Even when the price comes down, it's still going to be fun to replace an entire section of the car for a crack.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
like some sort of combination fake-vomit/sex toy device. THAT would be gross plastic. Not much protection, though. :)
You are not the customer.
Regardless what the submitter says, the article says that car manufacturers aren't looking at it because plastic is 3x more expensive than galvanized steal.
When plastic comes down in price, then it will be here. The thing that I don't like about this is it seems that it has to be in place during the molding process. This would mean that if you were to ever scratch it, or something along those lines, you'd have to replace the entire piece. Unless they developed a patch kit for it, which seems like the patch would be weaker than the rest of the area because it wasn't present in the mold...
Of course, a plastic fender with this on it would probably be cheap because they have already reduced the cost of plastic below that of steal. The thermochromatic aspect of it would be cool though, but I'd prefer it to be uniform. I wouldn't want the rest of the car to be black and my hood to be red... that would just look weird.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I got out of graduate school in 1999 and found myself in the market for a new car. I didn't shop around, I thought I knew what I wanted -- a new 2000 Saturn SC2, black. I found that dream car sitting on the lot, and bought it (well, a bank helped me).
So, here I am, 4 years later, the not-so-proud owner of a blackberry (purple in bright sunlight, black at night) Saturn, having learned so much about the downfalls of plastic. I'll never buy another Saturn. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have bought a Saturn in the first place. The sales pitch says this: when you get into an accident, plastic body panels are much easier to replace than metal ones. They don't say that every little ding and scrape you get (ever park next to an SUV that doesn't have enough repsect for drivers of smaller cars that they open their doors until they hit the next car over? Ever find a shopping cart resting against your car?) will leave you with a white mark. In a white car, that may not be bad, but when this car is all newly washed and shiney, it's got ugly white scratches on the sides and rear fender. For some reason, metal cars don't seem to have this problem as much.
Gloss plastic. In practice, does this mean that it'll stick as well as paint does to my plastic Saturn? Or will it have the staying power of paint on metal? I don't care about the press articles on it, I want to know what the field tests say in the hands of real people.
Sure, it's scratch-resistant, which would be pretty handy, given the fact that the width of the average parking space hasn't kept pace with the expanding girth of the average car. Seems like my car picks up a ding a day.
Wonder how it holds up to sunlight, though. There are plenty of scalded-looking cars driving around here in Georgia, and many more further south and west. Somehow, my sense is that combination of plastic + UV would be an issue.
What about bodywork? Can it be done? Beyond their dent-resistance threshold, do the panels deform or fail? (Didn't Audi have to set up its own network of trusted body shops before the introduction of the latest aluminum-bodied A6, then offer free flatbed service to new owners, b/c typical body shops didn't have the right equipment and expertise?)
If you had tiny temperature controls on the interior surface of the car, you could change the color of the car at the flick of the switch.
So, it is more resistant to minor damage. But if it's a film applied to the whole part, what happens if you do damage it?
The nice thing about paint is that you can patch a small area. This sounds like you'd have to replace the entire damaged part.
If so, it has the potential to slightly decrease the original price and really increase the maintenance and repair costs.
I'm not sure that constitutes an improvement.
Oh wait.. Nerds don't watch commecials. The just hit the skip button.
I still want transparent aluminum for my truck. Then I could carry my pet whale around.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
But dosent "scratch resistant" mean "Incredibly hard to fix once it has been scratched"?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
is knowing that I can get a segway in shiny bright purple.
The article mentions a car that is already available which has full plastic parts. More info can be found at the Smart website. I drive one of these, and I have bumped into obstacles while parking several times. Unlike a metal body, the plastic panel just springs back into shape after a bump. With a metal body, it would have been damaged visibly.
Other Smart drivers reported that after a crash, the car had no visible damge while the invisible parts beneath the body panels had been damaged severely, but the robust body panel had been hiding the damage.
I can really recommend these cars. They are the ultimate opposite to an SUV. 2.49 m long (7.5 feet!), 695 kg gross weight, can turn on a dime... wonderful.
Yes, you are right there. -- Another glass of champagne?
What occurs if you want to change the color of your car. Apparently paining it would be a sin if this material is supposed to replace paint. So that means you need to have the entire plastic surface removed and a new one put on?
So basically, it will be cheap enough to be wonderful as soon as it's not so expensive. Hrrmmm...
GE Plastics claims that the material is also theoretically capable of "thermochromic" effects that change the color with the temperature -- imagine your Lexus molting from red to black as you head from the desert to the mountains.
Uh, doesn't molting mean shedding skin or other outer coating? I can't think of one Lexus owner who wants to imagine their car molting. Giant strips of Lexus skin all over the road! Ewwwwwww!!!
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
Neat! Now i can complement my bad tint job with an equally bubbled paint job.. Yay!
"Classic" painting uses a lot of nasty chemicals, but is the production of this new plastic in any way safer?
sic luceat lux
Even though the plastic is 3 times more expensive than galvanized metal, it could still be more economical in the long run. A plastic body could result in a lighter car with better gas mileage (that's cheaper to run).
But I'd also worry about the possibility of a lighter car being less safe.
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
Would you really want a car that "hides the damage" though. I mean, it would be fine for minor dents, etc... but in the case of major damage it could be a safety risk. I remember last time I was in an accident (rear-ended), the insurance company paid for repairs, but I found a lot of hidden problems afterwords that I'm sure were related to the accident but not overly visible, thus not fixed. One of these included damage the metal brackets linking the bumper and tow-bars onto the frame of the car... which resulted in my bumper coming partly off next time I hooked up something to tow, not good.
Do you really want a bunch of damaged metal and loose welds hiding under a "seemingly" clean plastic coating?
Well, not to belabor an obvious point, but you wax plastic with. . . wax. Just as you do paint, wooden furniture, unpainted metal, every kind of flooring material you can think of (including plastics) and a host of other products and materials.
And for the same reasons. It adds a sacrificial layer that erodes instead of the base material. Prevents oxidation.Provides a smoother surface (racing cars are waxed for this reason, the aero drag of a waxed car is measurably lower than an unwaxed one), and as result, entirely coincidentally, gives a glossy sheen that some people find attractive.
People already wax plastic all the time. Hell, I wax my Lexan R/C car bodies. Makes 'em look great.
KFG
"We could look better than paint. But right now, we have to look like paint."
If they could make it better than paint then why don't they? If they can make a better product, save cost and make it look better it would give them more of an edge. Especially against an industry that has been part of auto making since the beginning. The more advantages the better.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke
I suppose it depends upon the vantage point of the people involved in a collision. Which would you rather be hit by: a Ford Explorer or a Honda CRZ?
There are also issues of a smaller car being more maneuverable. My wife once avoided a serious accident by being able to swerve her VW Rabbit very quickly to safely pass a camper shell that blew off from the vehicle in front of her on the freeway.
While larger and heavier vehicles absorb collision stress better than those of less mass, it's likely that a larger proportion of lighter vehicles on the road could reduce injuries by simply reducing the collision loads.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Most every part in the car contributes to the structural integrity of the vehicle.
Metal door skins and fenders are part of this overall structure. Even the windshield is part of the equation.
Of course if you switched to plastic ( as Saturn has done or the old fieros for example ) then you design around that...
Saw on TV commercials for this very thing recently, but they were touting lexan based panels..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Take a sheet of waxed paper. Grease it up with petroleum jelly. Now spray paint it. Do a good job, adding several coats.
You'll now find that you can simply peel the paint film from the paper backing. You will also now find that paint has no structural integrity whatsoever.
The primary function of painting metal is to prevent oxidation. Rust. It's secondary function is the purely cosmetic one of letting you change the color of the object. Note that the DeLoren, made of stainless steel, was not even available stock with paint on it.
KFG
In a white car, that may not be bad, but when this car is all newly washed and shiney, it's got ugly white scratches on the sides and rear fender. For some reason, metal cars don't seem to have this problem as much.
No metal cars just rust instead. Much better...
There's a drawback to any material. Plastic scrapes , steel rusts, aluminum corrodes, etc. Plastic is no exception. The "dent resistant" panels work but you can't hammer them either. They're durable, not indestructible. And it's easy enough to touch them up.
I drive a Saturn and it's a fine vehicle. (1993 SC2) Fun to drive (for its price), good fuel mileage, low insurance, very reliable and it isn't offensive to the eyes either. I don't have the problems with the paint the previous poster described either. When washed it looks pretty good for a car with 120,000 miles on it. I expect it to last me another 60-80,000 miles too. Not much more you can ask for really.
I don't mean to be a smart aleck -- well, maybe a little -- but do want to mention that the ever-increasing complexity of our lives is often good but not always necessary. If I could, I would like to get rid of my car altogether -- I'm no Luddite, but I think a lot of our technological improvements are aimed at correcting the problems introduced by our other technological improvement and distract us from fundamental goals. For example, we have for years been stalled with inefficient and polluting engines whose lifespan has been increased by ingenious inventions of emission control, electronic ignition, and so on, rather than inventing anew with fuel cells and the like (which are fundamentally not a new technology).
With respect to the improvement of paint, it is a wonderful idea that if successful would avoid a lot of waste in paint's first mission, preserving the vulnerable material underneath. But why don't we find ways to get rid of the sheet metal altogether? Saturn is the only one to have taken it really seriously, and I imagine part of that was the advantage of starting as a new company (yes, as a spinoff of a very old one, but you know what I mean -- UAW didn't even hold their new plant to the standard rules, and that was revolutionary!). They haven't beat the problems, but at least they've tried.
Here's a analogy I heard from a professor: Back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI used to hold up every year a graph of the steady increase in their interdiction of interstate stolen cars. Problem was, interstate theft was increasing even faster. Then Detroit went to ignition steering wheel locks, eliminating the simple way to steal a car by hot wiring. The rate of theft plummeted. Sometimes changing something fundamental is more efficient that layering on additional layer of protection. (I hope the analogy held, but you get the idea.)
reduced the cost of plastic below that of steal
;)
Can you really reduce anything below the cost of steal?
"We are far too easily pleased." --C.S. Lewis
Pontiac Fieros were plastic-bodied way back in 1984. The problem with plastic car bodies is the fact that they have huge coeffecients of thermal expansion. So when the car gets hot, door gaps and seals tend to distort themselves out of place. Early GM experiments showed that some doors became unclosable, and windows fell from their frames. Different compounds and intelligent design solved many of the problems, though; the Fiero body never rusts and mine looks great after all these years. Mine does not catch on fire, either, since I have a 420-horsepower V-8 in the back instead of the wheezing 4-banger. So plastic is certainly not revolutionary, but applying plastic in very thin sheets is certainly interesting.
Every car with a seperate frame and body suffers from this lack of rigidity.
It's not only perfectly possible to make a stressed skin plastic car, but the chassis of every Indy car and Grand Prix car is made entirely of stressed plastics. Because they are stronger, lighter and offer greater protection in a crash then steel,
The primary reason for using steel in the construction of production automobiles is manufacturing cost. Steel can be run down an assembely line in sheet form and *stamped* into complex structural shapes in fractions of a second.
Other materials have traditionally required skilled labor to form and more expesive machinery that takes longer to form a part than stamped steel.
Plus, your steel car rusts out in 10 years and they get to sell you a new one. Never underestimate the power of planned obsolesence. GM invented the overt philosophy.
KFG
Corvettes have had fiberglass bodies since the early seventies.
That's why I hate being in Corvette accidents. I can handle the broken bones, blood loss and internal damage but the damn itching that the fiberglass gives you really sucks.
Trolling is a art,
Second, metal is stronger than plastics, up until you get into carbon fiber or similar carbon or aramid composites, which aren't plastics. They're composites. Even FRP (Fiber-reinforced plastic) which is somewhat common for air dams and such, it's floppy. You could make it hard but then it would be brittle.
Something that people tend to forget about cars is that unibody cars are a monocoque or semi-monocoque design. Most unibody cars are actually half monocoque, with a unibody rear, and then frame rails and underfenders just sort of sitting out in front of the car beyond that. The entire back skin of a unibody car is load-bearing, which is why it's a monocoque design. Stresses from spirited driving are transferred into the roof. This is why convertibles are floppy and require additional reinforcement.
There are some full-monocoque cars, like the older Opel GT. They don't really HAVE a classic frame, they're just built up where the suspension equipment bolts on. Of course the new classic example (since no one seems to know what an Opel GT is any more) is the McLaren F1, which everyone has heard of. That, however, is a carbon fiber full-monocoque design.
So metal is stronger than plastic, necessary in the car's design, and it will in almost every case look different than plastic even after painting. Plastic and metal require different primers, and the texture of the primer on a different material changes the way the car looks when it is painted. It can also be a challenge to get a primer for plastic and a primer for metal which won't interact differently with the paint you lay on top of it.
If you want a prime (oh I kill me) example of this phenomenon, examine a Pontiac Fiero. The Saturns with plastic doors aren't old enough to really see a color change, but of course that is due to fading which this stuff is supposed to not do. The Fieros, however, are painted with different paints depending on whether you're painting plastic or metal. It becomes very noticable on them as they age.
The final and perhaps most compelling reason to use metal is that it has the best failure mode out of all available materials. Plastic tends to shatter when you put enough force into the same part of it all at once. Steel, on the other hand, first work hardens when you flex it, making it stronger in the bent place. If you bend it beyond its elastic limit, anyway. If you continue to stress it it will distress (Crack) and then tear. However, with sheet steel, it mostly causes other areas to deform instead of tearing.
With steel, there is no damage which cannot be repaired. Pieces too badly damaged to straighten can be replaced to or near original specifications by removing a relatively small piece and fabricating a new piece of steel to fill the hole. This is true of any steel part of the car, from the body to the unibody to the frame. Plastic, on the other hand, usually has to be cured into a shape. Plastic bumper covers can be repaired (with some difficulty) but they are not load-bearing. They're just dressing. The only load they ever have to bear is atmospheric.
I should not have to remind you that this tendency to work-harden when pushed past the elastic limit and excellent failure mode is the technology behind "crumple zones" in cars. We know about how the stress is going to be transferred into other parts of the steel. Even cars which DO have plastic parts on the outside have metal parts right under them to deal with crashes. The upgraded version of crumple zone technology is used in NASCAR racing, and it's carbon fiber honeycombs built to fail in a predictable way, just like the crumple zones in a normal car - except of course the cells are smaller and more predictable. The bumpers are also upwards of $2000, which makes them impractical for street use.
Steel is cheap and good and can be easily repaired out in the real world. Plastics may make it possible, but they also possibly make repairs a big pain in the ass. You have to consider the difficulty of repair as well as initial construction.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Maybe the question should be: How harmful is the current paint process to the envorinment? (The answer to that is very much so -- probably the most harmful of any part of the car-building process...including the actual driving part for about 50,000 miles). The logical followup is: Compared with the current paint process, how safe is the plastic technique? Is it as recyclable as steel?
-Turkey
I can't believe this actually made it on Slashdot, there's already a COMMERCIAL for this on TV, it's narrated by Alec Baldwin and he talks all about it and then at the end tells you GE is cool.
I can see it now, soon there's going to be a slashdot article "NEW AXE BODY SPRAY WILL REVOLUTIONIZE SMELL SCIENCE!" and "NEW SPRAY AND SWEEP SWIFFER SWEEPER ADVANCES STATIC ATTRACTIVE DUST SCIENCE!
It accelerates from 0 to 100 kph (60 mph) in 17 seconds. That's not much, in the regions of a cheap 2+2 seat offroad car or a cheaper van. However, it accelerates much faster in the range of 0 - 50 kph range. It has a sequential 6 gear shift which can be switched between semiautomatic and automatic. The engine has 599 ccm (699 ccm in newer models), is available as a Diesel engine also, it has 40 kW (54 HP), the maximum speed is 130 kph (electronic cut-off, without it it goes about 165 kph).
It has air condition, ESP, ABS, 4 airbags (2 as an extra), and although it is not cheap, it is VERY cost effective.
BTW, I have been driving at -25 C, and no, the body panels did not shatter when I slammed a door. It has rear wheel drive, which actually is more of a problem in winter.
Yes, you are right there. -- Another glass of champagne?
one word: corvette.
There doesn't seem to be any shortage of those on the roads, and this picture is an example of what happens when you bump into someone while driving your big fiberglass manhood-enhancer.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
Go ahead. I double dare you.
You can't do it. So called "carbon fiber" is a *composite* of carbon fibers and plastic. The plastic gives the form and the fibers add rigidity, taking advantage of the best attributes of both.
Such plastic plus fiber composites have been with us for ages. The WW1 Albatross fighter plane fuselage was made from composite materials, as was the PT boat, although must people don't recognize it as such.
That's right. *Plywood*, chip board and fiberboard are manufactured, actually high tech, plastic composite material using wood fibers instead of glass or graphite.
Your views on plastic as a throw away item is biased by the fact that plastics are the materials used to make disposable items. This has nothing to do with the plastic itself. What is one of the primary problems with this? Plastics don't degrade and build up in the land dumps. Metal does. Please note from the article that this plastic they have developed in *not* subject to degradation from uv light.
In any case, you can do exactly the same thing with a production plastic car to protect it from uv radiation as they do for GP cars.
Paint 'em.
There. Problem solved.
Trust me, I can make you a plastic car that will last for eons. Just like that Dixie cup you threw away last week.
KFG
The only issue with Sollx is that it seems to make cars hard to steal. While that would generally be a good thing, it will ruin future releases of Grand Theft Auto.
"Quick, take this car down to the, um, place and have it dipped in Sollx."
Most high production fiberglass parts are manufactured by blowing the resin and glass mixture onto a mold. The color is typically applied either as a mixture in the resin or by coating the mold prior to applying the resin and glass. I believe all current automotive applications for fiberglass are painted though--mostly because of the non-glossy finish. It's all about picking the right material for the application.
Kevlar uses aramid fibers in place of the glass, but works along the same theory.
Let's get our semantics right. All plastics are polymers. Not all polymers are what we would call "plastics" (e.g. DNA), but from an engineering perspective, virtually all polymers are interrelated.
Your example shows you don't know what your are talking about. Acrylic is a plastic. You can buy chunks of it from McMaster-Carr. It is dissolved in a solvent and sprayed on for paint, but what do you think happens when the solvent dissolves? The acrylic re-deposits to form a film, but it is still fundamentally the same material that is used to make those clear tumblers you can buy at Crate & Barrel.
Can you heat it up and cause the film to flow? Yes, but that just makes it a thermoplastic (as opposed to a thermoset). You could do the same thing with a polyethylene film. The difference with polyethylene is that the flow temperature is about 120C (250F), whereas Acrylic will flow at temperatures closer to 60C (150F).
All paint contains a lot of highly engineered polymers with adhesive properties. Thus, paint amounts to brush on (or spray on) plastic coatings.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
Don't do that! Due to natural selection, you're just breeding stronger shopping carts!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.