In Japan, temperatures now remain stuck above 30 degrees for weeks in the summer, and companies are looking for solutions to try to cool down the daily lives of residents.
Published
Updated
Reading time: 3 min
The Japanese weather agency just announced, at the beginning of September, that the country had experienced the hottest summer in its recent history. Nissan wants to offer a car paint that cools the passenger compartment of cars. The Japanese manufacturer has just announced that it has even started full-scale tests of its revolutionary paint.
It was developed for months in a lab with Chinese company Radi-Cool, but now it’s being applied directly to cars that spend hours outside in the sun. To make its measurements, Nissan chose commercial vehicles used on the tarmac at Haneda Airport, near central Tokyo. There’s no shade. It’s stiflingly hot.
The new paint is very effective compared to conventional coatings. The group explains that it can lower the temperature at the roof of cars by 12 degrees. And this translates into a five-degree drop in the passenger compartment, inside the vehicles. This is potentially very interesting. Because it means that drivers will use less energy or fuel to operate their air conditioning and cool their car. This is positive for the environment.
This paint uses passive radiative cooling technology. Instead of being made of a classic resin that absorbs a large part of the sun’s heat, it is composed of different particles that can send the heat back into space in the form of electromagnetic waves. This is a technology that is already used on some buildings to lower temperatures inside. But it had to be refined to be able to use it, for the first time, on car bodies.
The thickness of this paint and its price still need to be worked on. It is generally six times thicker than a normal car paint and it costs much more. The idea is therefore to offer it first to professional vehicles. Nissan is thinking of food transport trucks or ambulances.
This will give engineers time to develop a thinner, cheaper product that can be used in future production cars for private individuals.