Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer Nissan Motor Corporation, or simply Nissan, originally debuted in Tokyo in 1911 under the name Kwaishinsha Motor Car Works. Three years later, the company produced its first automobile model, the DAT. It was an acronym of its first investors’ surnames: Kenjiro Den (D), Rokuro Aoyama (A), and Meitaro Takeuchi (T).
The company seemed to have enjoyed naming the vehicles after its investors, as evidenced by the 1931 release of the Datsun passenger car. The first of the firm’s legendary “Datson” line, which means “Son of DAT.” The -o- was later changed to a -u- in the name, making it “Datsun,” since the word “son” in Japanese can also mean “loss.” The company’s name isn’t the only thing that’s changed over 100 years since its founding.
One of Nissan’s most recent technological developments, a new type of car paint undergoing trials, might appear undeserving of a descriptor like “technological,” but hindsight is 20/20.
The automaker says a paint, designed for electric vehicles (EVs), is capable of reducing a car’s exterior surface temperature by 21.6 degrees Fahrenheit and interior temperature by 9 degrees.
The paint thus lowers the energy output required for vehicles, keeping their air inside cool. It’s also hard not to think about the potential applications of this paint in other realms, but we’ll get to that later.
Photo Courtesy Nissan Motor Corporation
Developed in partnership with Radi-Cool, which specializes in radiative cooling products, Nissan’s “cool paint” is partly made of metamaterial, synthetic composite materials with properties not typically found in naturally occurring materials.
This makeup basically allowed the team to add specific properties to the paint through artificially created compounds. The most important of those properties is high solar-reflectiveness.
Now, this type of technology admittedly isn’t a new concept. Radiant cooling paint has historically been used on the exteriors of buildings, cargo containers, and other surfaces. Meant to combat the heat-island effect, these have always been super thick, needed to be painted on by rollers, and often left a chalk-like residue when touched. So, while Nissan’s paint isn’t technically a never-before-seen concept, it’s in an entirely different category than its predecessors.
Photo Courtesy Nissan Motor Corporation
Dr. Susumu Miura, the senior manager at the Advanced Materials and Processing Laboratory at the Nissan Research Center, is a major reason why this groundbreaking paint design exists today. An expert in material design (and a lot of other things, too), Mirua has spent years creating and perfecting cutting-edge technologies for Nissan, including a noise-reducing acoustic material that won the Popular Science award.
Given his resume, it’s definitely not a shock that, only a few years after Miura and his team set out to develop a temperature-reducing car paint in 2021, they’ve accomplished just that.
“My dream is to create cooler cars without consuming energy,” stated Miura in a Nissan press release. “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.”
Although the technology is currently still in its testing phase, there’s no doubt that it is indeed a really “cool” paint with truly promising potential.
