This New Paint Tech Is Cool and Needs to Reach Production

• Nissan is testing a new paint technology with cooling properties that is composed of metamaterials, which promises to reflect more sunlight.

• The cooling paint is being developed with EVs in mind, as it could help conserve battery power during high usage of air conditioning.

• Nissan has been testing the paint on a Nissan NV100 service vehicle used by All Nippon Airways (ANA) at Tokyo International Air Terminal at Haneda.

Residents of the southern states have known for a while that optioning a car in Nuke Flash White has benefits aside from preventing your car from bursting into flames in the event of a nuclear exchange nearby.

This is also one of several reasons why many rental cars are ordered in white: Nobody likes getting into a black Pontiac Grand Prix that has been sitting in the sun at the Palm Springs airport all day. (The other reasons are price, ease of repaint, and upkeep costs).

It's also the official color of cars with Florida plates.

But a paint color just by itself can only do so much—there is room for scientists with slide rules to do even better.

Nissan has recently teamed up with radiative cooling product maker Radi-Cool to test a paint that uses synthetic composite materials and metamaterial that includes two microstructure particles that react to light.

One of the particles creates electromagnetic waves that repel the sun's rays back into the atmosphere, while the other reflects near-infrared rays that tend to cause molecular level vibrations within the resin of the paint.

The automaker has been testing this paint on a Nissan NV100 service vehicle used by All Nippon Airways (ANA) at Tokyo International Air Terminal at Haneda, taking advantage of airports' well-known tendency to heat up cars to temperatures more associated with atmospheric re-entry. (Why is it always airport parking lots?)

The results have been encouraging.

"Parked side-by-side under the sun, a vehicle treated in Nissan's cool paint has shown yields of up to a 21.6-degree Fahrenheit reduction in exterior surface temperatures and up to 9-degree Fahrenheit cooler interior, compared to a vehicle featuring traditional automotive paint," Nissan notes.

Nissan says radiant cooling paint isn't a new concept per se and has been used on the exteriors of buildings for quite some time. However, as used in construction, the paint tends to require very thick layers, and can also leave a chalky residue if a transparent topcoat isn't added.

So in automotive applications, this type of paint has had rather limited potential.

Meanwhile, paint thickness is still an issue. Since starting development on this program back in 2021, Nissan has tested more than 100 paint samples. The automaker is now testing a paint with a thickness of 120 microns, or about six times thicker than your average car paint.

Susumu Miura, senior manager and expert at the Advanced Materials and Processing Laboratory and leader of the project, says the issue of efficient interior cooling has taken on a new importance in the EV age, as cooling the cabin with air conditioning consumes battery power.

"My dream is to create cooler cars without consuming energy" Miura says. "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."

As for us, we're still waiting for the day when solar cells can be successfully incorporated into the entirety of a vehicle's exterior—not just the roof—and actually give us a range boost we can notice.

In your experience, does regular white paint make a big difference in terms of cooling a vehicle's interior in times of high heat? Let us know in the comments below.