Two-tone paint schemes have become extremely common in the car market. It’s not just Mini doing contrasting roofs anymore. Now everything from a Chevy Equinox EV to a Toyota Corolla Cross Hybrid is available with a two-tone look. The conventional way of doing a two-tone paint scheme is somewhat cumbersome and time-consuming, since it requires a vehicle to be manually masked off to do the second pass of color. Renault has figured out a way to avoid that whole extra process with some cool robotic sprayers.
The Jetprint Paint Process
What allows Renault to dramatically simplify its two-tone paint process is an incredibly precise sprayer. It’s able to spray at widths between 1 and 50 millimeters, or as little as 0.04 inch to 2 inches. These sprayers are mounted to robotic arms that move back and forth along the sections of car meant to be painted. In the case of the Renault 4 E-Tech, the first car to use this process, that includes the roof and the hood. According to Renault, the robotic sprayers can complete the sections in six minutes.
Naturally, one of the biggest benefits of this process is the fact that you don’t have to have people going through and masking cars to go through a paint process a second time. It goes farther than that, though. Renault notes that with the traditional two-tone process, a painted body would have to go through an oven-drying process to cure the paint enough so that it could be safely masked for a second run. This eliminates that step, since no one has to touch the car. That also results in an energy savings of 1.7 GWh a year, which means fewer carbon emissions, and, like almost every other aspect of the process, less money spent.
Renault also notes that this process also results in no waste spray. It does leave one wondering if Renault should use this process for all its paint, but it may still be faster to use traditional sprayers for a whole body and chassis, especially for getting coverage in tight areas.
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This Opens Up Interesting Possibilities
Obviously, this process is chock-full of potential cost and time savings for automakers, which could make options such as two-tone paints more available on more cars, for less money. It also presents the possibility of getting creative with paint schemes. Renault itself suggests this, and it’s not hard to imagine what you could do with computer-controlled sprayers that can spray at such narrow widths. It would seemingly be easy to paint complex lettering, stripes and more with the system, and do so at a price tag that would’ve only been possible with printed vinyl decals. We’re excited to see what Renault comes up with, and we hope the technology spreads to other automakers, too.
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