From the “Inventions We Never Asked For” file comes a new glow-in-the-dark car paint, co-developed by Nissan Europe and inventor Hamish Scott. According to Nissan, the spray coating absorbs UV energy during the day and then glows for between eight and 10 hours after the sun goes down. Want to see it in action? Nissan even has made a semi-creepy video (embedded at the bottom of this post) of a glowing Leaf electric car meandering around in the dark. Yeah, prison escapees and chronic speeders should not apply.
Glowing paint is nothing new (and, fortunately, not popular), but what makes this one unique is that the paint contains a “rare natural earth product” called Strontium Aluminate, which allegedly is solid, odorless, and chemically and biologically inert. We ain’t chemists over here, so we’ll have to take Nissan’s word for it. But that means it’s organic!
The paint’s organic chemistry and solar tie-in explains why Nissan decided to put the eerie paint on the homely Leaf and not something prettier, like, say, an old 240Z. You see, talking about sun energy getting captured by paint provides a handy segue to a discussion of fitting solar panels to your home, which Nissan says is a way to drive the Leaf for free. Of course, “free” means different things to different people, and the way we see it, the price you’ll pay by driving a Leaf—especially one that glows in the damn dark—isn’t worth it.
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