Mark Gutjahr, head of design at BASF
Europe. “People have a need for a sense
of uniqueness, of things which are special.
They want to show who they really are,
their true selves but not necessarily in an
up-front way. Satisfying all these needs
through different colors and surfaces can
be difficult with cars.”
Individuality in cars can be shown
through shades and variations of the
main colors, in which in Europe and
much of the rest of the world the top
preferences have been altering in re-
cent years.
“The fastest growing color in the
European auto market has been white,”
said Gutjahr. “Seven years ago white
had a market share in the German auto
market of three percent. Now it is 27
percent. The main loser has been silver
whose share in Germany has dropped
from 40 percent to 27 percent.”
The major colors, which in addition
to silver and white include in Europe
black, blue, red and brown, are having
to be modified to suit individual or lo-
calized tastes usually with the help of
effect pigments.
“We are seeing different whites on
cars across Europe depending on the
region or country,” said Astrid Van der
Auwera from BASF’s global design team.
“In some parts of Europe it might have
a bluish hue and in others a yellow one
with a hint of silver.”
BASF’s designers are forecasting that
while demand for white will remain
strong, the emerging colors of the future
will be red, turquoise and aubergine.
The company has been gaining an
increased capacity for differentiation of
colors through the development of innovative effect pigments through the
thinning and shaping of metallic and
glass flakes. These can, for example,
make a car body appear bright and dark
from different viewing angles with the
same coatings.
The XFine coatings of BASF comprise very thin aluminium flake particles
which are arranged flat next to the other
to provide a mirror effect. The color of
the car appears particularly bright on the
edges of its body and very dark when
viewed from the side.
Its latest effect innovation is the
XSpark OEM coating which is based
on uniformly shaped and sized particles
made of a glass whose exact identity
BASF is not revealing, except that it has
a similar chemistry to boron silicate.
“A key feature is that due to the con-
sistent shape and size of its particles there
is no or hardly any interference with
the reflection of the light,” explained
Stephan Schwarte, head of BASF’s
basecoat pigments/dispersions and color
design laboratory. “This means that it
produces an intense, precise sparkle that
does not have the rainbow colors of oth-
er effect pigments.”
With effect pigments being applied
on cars in a layer above the colored
basecoats, an important result of the
XSpark technology is that the clean re-
flected light of its particles enables a pure
color to come through from underneath.
“With the aid of our innovations in ef-
fects we’re already able to focus more on
the ‘in-between’ – that space between the
main colors,” said Gutjahr. “Now withX-
Spark we can provide the additional spe-
cial attraction of pure color. It’s all part
of the overall ‘wow’ effect with a different
visual impact inside and outside full light.”
The new advances gives the com-
pany greater versatility in meeting the
requirements of the auto manufacturers
for colors and effects which are specific
to their models.
“They want colors and effects
which are unique to them,” Gujahr
commented.“They don’t want colors
which they have to share with their com-
petitors. Each model will have its own
body shapes, lines and contours which
need special colors and effects.”
Also new color concepts do not just
have to meet the visual requirements of
OEMs for their models but need to be
consistent with the demands of their ap-
plication systems.
“The automobile makers have dif-
ferent paint shops so a specific color
coating that works in one may not
work in another,” said Schwarte. “You
have to adjust the colors for different
application conditions and leave room
in your formulations for this. You even
have to take into account the size of
pigments particles to ensure they are
suitable for the filters in paint pipelines
in paint shops.”
The design and performance of robot
paint sprayers have to be considered. At
the moment they make up an average 20
percent of paint work on new automo-
biles. But this proportion will be increas-
ing in an effort to cut costs.
“The atomizers on the robot heads
reduce the paint to tiny, invisible drop-
lets, which provide a high level of
transfer efficiency,” explained Christian
Bornemann, head of BASF’s applica-
tion center for coatings at Muenster.
“But several factors influence this per-
formance, such as air flow, tempera-
ture and humidity, as well as how the
droplets respond to travelling through
a 70,000 kW electrical field during the
spraying process.”
Innovative colors can take a long
time to reach the automobile market—
usually approximately two to three
years but sometimes as long as five,
mainly because of the need for tests,
such as those for weather resistance and
application consistency. Once a color
idea has been conceived the hard task is
verifying its feasibility in terms of paint
shop conditions and the practical needs
of the OEM manufacturer. CW
“The major colors,
which in addition
to silver and white
include in Europe
black, blue, red and
brown, are having
to be modified to
suit localized tastes
ususally with the help
of effect pigments. ”
