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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

Cool concept, looks super slow relative to exciting assembly plant paint though. Upside is you can buy a plaid car from the factory, downside is it’s +$5k and an extra month lead time.

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Considering there's already 6 month waits on new cars, I'd happily throw in an extra month if it meant I got to use an online editor to design my own paint job.

Not sure about the German factories but we ordered an X7 a couple months ago from their Spartanburg, SC plant and it took 3 weeks.

Surely $100K+ SUVs are at the top of their production lists? My understanding is that the lower the price, the sooner the shortages hit a car.

https://cdn.drawception.com/drawings/T25OX7JfsD.png

The article claims that it saves money, rather than costing extra.

I think that is relative to custom paint vs existing manual methods. That i would agree with, i just don’t see this replacing single tone paint methods. Which likely wasn't why it was built, so not sure why i'm pointing that out haha.

Looking at the orange base-coat in the video, I'd suggest it saves money versus hand-painted custom paint jobs but as every surface of the car (inside doors) are orange, I'd say that was applied by the traditional robot painters (with HVLP guns).

It saves BMW money. You still have to pay more.

I'm trying to think of a company that provides the customer an extra personalization service that did not charge more for it... I got nothing.

Off the top of my head: tailors embroider the clothing they make for customers and luxury clothing companies like Luis Vuitton engrave the customer's name or a message on products like wallets. IIRC even Apple used to engrave custom messages on some of their products for free.

Apple still offers free engraving on selected products:

https://www.apple.com/shop/engraving-and-gift-wrap

And this still hurts secondary market sales, which may or may not be Apple’s plan, we’ll never know.

I would think that if they were really trying to check the secondary market, they’d allow engraving for iPhones. Surely that’s by far the one that cuts most deeply into the bottom line.

That evil Apple with their evil free engraving schemes!

Custom embroiders/engraves are basically a way to reduce the second hand market as fewer people want to buy a luxury product with someone else's name on it.

It saves money in air compressor energy costs, but the article glosses over how long this takes compared to traditional methods. If it takes 10 times as long to paint a car this way then you have to replicate it 10 times in the factory to maintain the same rate of production which could very easily end up costing more.

On the other hand, masking is a pain in the ass and takes a lot of time so this could end up being faster all around so long as you're comparing with complex multi-tone paintjobs.

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