History of Automotive Paint

Producing an automobile mostly comes down to physics and engineering, but, like chrome, paint mostly comes down to chemistry.

During the rapid development of the motorcar in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the complex chemical compounds and sophisticated techniques employed by today’s carmakers simply didn’t exist. Some early cars were hand-painted. Like, with a brush. Even as automotive production grew, paint with a varnish-like composition was the most common finish, applied in multiple layers with sanding in between, then polished for shine. Applying it was a very lengthy process, and it was slow to dry. For Ford’s assembly-line–built Model T, paint was the slowest part of the production process and therefore a significant bottleneck. Ford streamlined things with the famous “any color you like, as long as it’s black” philosophy starting in 1914. Model Ts began wearing “Japan black,” an asphalt-and-linseed-oil-based paint that was cheaper, more durable, and supposedly quicker to dry than other shades and finishes.

Starting in the 1920s, nitrocellulose, also used in military and photographic applications, was developed into a sprayable lacquer that drastically reduced drying times and was both scratch resistant and compatible with a broad variety of pigments. In the mid-1920s DuPont introduced its Duco brand, credited as the first paint of its kind developed specifically for the car industry, and Ford and GM both embraced nitrocellulose lacquer during this period.


By the 1930s, alkyd enamel coatings adaptable to an even larger selection of colors gained widespread popularity in the industry, and these were followed by acrylic enamels in the 1950s. The use of electrocoating for a primer coat, starting in the 1960s, allowed for better corrosion resistance on metal body pieces.

By the 1970s, the newly established Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sought to regulate various industries, which of course included those producing automotive paint. Regulations like the Clean Air Act aimed to reduce carbon emissions from paint facilities as well as emissions from volatile organic compounds (VOCs), like solvents in the sprayed paint itself, which have negative implications for ozone and public health.


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The law, as well as carmakers’ desire for added durability, lead to the widespread adoption of base-coat and clear-coat systems. In this setup, the base coat carries the pigment and does little else, while the clear coat applied on top carries all the properties for durability, UV resistance, and gloss.

The base-coat/clear-coat system became widespread during the 1980s, and by the ’90s waterborne basecoats, which reduce VOCs and are more durable, became commonplace. Today, the use of water-based acrylic polyurethane enamel paint used as a base coat with a clear coat on top is nearly universal in the car industry.