Why Do Automakers Put That Strange Camo On Cars?

Question: Why do cars prior to launch have that strange black-and-white paint job?

Answer: Once in a while, you may happen upon a vehicle on the road wearing a lot of black and white. No, it’s not a police car, but a new vehicle stretching its legs with the public as part of its ongoing testing before hitting the production line (and thus, your nearest showroom floor) months later.  Some manufacturers like to be creative with their black-and-white camo schemes, from swirling graphics to fake body panels meant to obscure the shape of the new vehicle as much as possible.

The big question, though, is why opt for black-and-white camo in the first place? It’s certainly not stopping spy photographers from delivering their work to automotive publications whose audiences salivate over every detail of the next big thing to roll out of Detroit, Stuttgart, Toyota City, or Seoul. Why not green-and-red, or blue-and-orange?

Short answer: It’s not meant to stop the photogs; it’s meant to confound the competitors.

Back in World War I, the Allied Powers (specifically the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom and the United States Navy) were having a difficult time hiding their ships from the Central Powers in all weather conditions during combat. British zoologist John Graham Kerr devised a solution to this problem, penning a letter in September 1914 to future prime minister Winston Churchill, who was the Royal Navy’s First Sea Lord at the time. Kerr’s suggestion to Churchill was to use disruptive coloration and countershading on the ships, the latter involving the guns painted in lighter tones below, darker tones above. The goal was to make the ships harder to hit by destroying completely “the continuity of outlines by splashes of white.” Alas, this tactic lasted until Churchill left the British Admiralty in 1915, and the Royal Navy went back to plain gray.

2016 Dodge Grand Caravan spy shot.

Enter British marine painter Norman Wilkinson. In 1917, he was serving in the Royal Navy’s Volunteer Reserve on submarine patrols and minesweeping operations. An attack by German U-boats in April of that year gave Wilkinson a brilliant thought: if the Royal Navy couldn’t hide the ships from the U-boats, why not instead make it difficult to properly direct the torpedoes to their targets from a distance via periscope?

The result? Dazzle camouflage, a form of camouflage using complex geometric patterns and contrasting colors which interrupted or intersected each other from stem to stern. The British Admiralty adopted the scheme for their ships soon after, followed by the U.S. Navy’s Camouflage Corps in March 1918, where Wilkinson held a one-month consultancy.

As Wilkinson so explained in a 1919 lecture:

The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the enemy to miss his shot when actually in firing position, but to mislead him, when the ship was first sighted, as to the correct position to take up. Dazzle was a method to produce an effect by paint in such a way that all accepted forms of a ship are broken up by masses of strongly contrasted color, consequently making it a matter of difficulty for a submarine to decide on the exact course of the vessel to be attacked.

Though effectiveness of dazzle camouflage was mixed at best during WWI, advancements in technology during WWII – including the introduction of radar – muted the scheme’s effectiveness.

Fast-forward a few decades, and dazzle camouflage is on every new vehicle undergoing shakedowns prior to finalization and official production. The spy photographers are the new periscopes for the automakers’ submariners, where instead of determining where to fire, they’re attempting to counter design features – aerodynamics, styling, headlight shapes – with ones of their own.

How did dazzle camouflage end up on cars? According to Gizmodo, General Motors said they adopted the century-old scheme in the late 1980s, with extensive use ramping up through the 1990s and into today, coinciding with more consumers having access to cameras and, later, smartphones. AutoGuide’s Sami Haj-Assaad adds the dazzle camouflage used on vehicles – which is made by vinyl wrap companies like Graphik Concepts in Detroit – is meant to confuse cameras equipped with a sonar-esque infrared-light auto-focusing system; auto-focus DSLRs use contrast auto-focusing to accomplish the same task. Either way, the “periscopes” are left confused.

As with its original application, however, the use of dazzle camouflage on vehicles doesn’t appear to be hindering the spy photographers. In the same AutoGuide article, legendary spy photographer Brenda Priddy says the camo not only hasn’t interfered with her cameras’ ability to focus, but she herself found dazzle camo “very photogenic,” and looks forward to the next attempts to “dazzle” her lenses every year.

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