No matter how familiar you are with the automotive industry, you still hardly have an idea of just how much effort, time and testing it takes to launch a new car model into production.
Luckily for us all, Nissan is a company that doesn’t shun from revealing its trade secrets from time to time. Today, we are treated to a video telling us how Nissan engineers test the quality of the car paint.
Now, you may think the process essentially boils down to painting a car and then leaving it parked somewhere outside, where it can be exposed to the elements for a long period of time. However, time is a luxury few manufacturers can afford in sufficient amounts. To accelerate the process, the Japanese enterprise came up with the Xenon Weather-Ometer, an ‘artificial sun’ that allows for much faster testing of various lacquering solutions and techniques.
The Xenon Weather-Ometer is essentially a 4,000W Xenon lamp that can simulate sunlight 24/7 for a hundred of paint samples at the same time. Since the normal sun doesn’t stay up in the sky nearly as long, this means more than a 2x gain in testing speed.
At this moment, the Xenon Weather-Ometer has no way of emulating other typical environmental factors such as rainwater, wind and snow. But who knows, perhaps Nissan will come up with something in the near future.
Photo: Nissan