Unbelievable Color Changing Car!! : Facts

Story:

Unbelievable Color Changing Car!!

A revolutionary technology that allows you to change your vehicle color using your smart-phone or built in controls. Prism shaped metallic pigments are rotated based on the voltage frequency dispersed throughout the vehicle body, giving you the ability to change your cars color.

Other Versions

Paramagnetic Paint – Unbelievable Color Changing Car.

Analysis:

A video circulating online claims to show an unbelievable color changing car that works in association with its ‘Paramagnetic’ paint and your Smartphone or built in controls. It is said that the paramagnetic paint works by adjusting the voltage of an electrical current sent through the vehicle’s bodywork. It is shown that using this new technology, you can change your car’s color to red, purple, blue, green, yellow and brown within a matter of seconds. The claims are not facts.

Facts about the Video

The video showing a car with this special property to change color magically was published on YouTube on 21 May 2013 by user Justin Jimmo, whose about information suggests that he is an aspiring film-maker, actor and VFX (visual effects) artist, and that he has created an auto body repair community known as “Refinish Network”.

On 12 Jun 2013, in his same YouTube channel, Justin Jimmo posted another video (second video in this article) that revealed that the video in question showing a color changing car was a hoax. The video was created using Adobe’s After Affects video editing software which he explained in his second video titled ‘Color Changing Car – After Effects Tutorial‘. The description of the video said:

An incredibly simply effect in After Effects and a basic demonstration of key-frame animating. Sorry to all the people I fooled earlier, color changing cars won’t be on the market any time soon.

This was done with version “CS6” however it translates the same way into past versions and I’m sure future ones.

Color Changing Paint

Although the video in question was a hoax, the concept of color changing paint for cars is a fact that came into light in 2007 from the General Motors. From the description of a related article on AutoBlog.com:

Instead of the conventional method, a new technology might be on the way to make a color change as easy as twisting a knob. It’s actually quite similar to the magic General Motors has wrought with their magnetorheological dampers. The variable-color paint works this way: prior to paint, the body gets a special polymer coating that’s got paramagnetic iron oxide particles in it. When a current passes through this coating, the ferrous particles change their alignment, which alters the way they reflect light, effectively changing the car’s color.

To Conclude

The video showing a color changing car using paramagnetic paint is a hoax, and was created using video editing software. It’s a fact that the said technology was proposed in the past, but as of this writing, the color changing cars are not in the market. We may expect them sometime in the future.

In a related prank in past, Auto Company Peugeot claimed to have come up with the first car that changes its color with your emotion. As you can see its promo in the third video, the company calls it a new innovation in paint technology, where the Peugeot RCZ can show exactly how you’re feeling by literally changing its body color. It was an April fools’ prank; as you can see in the Peugeot UK article archive peugeot.co.uk, which was published on 31 Mar 2012 and is now taken down. Pranks of this kind reach a wide audience you see!