I was in NYC today, and as I was making my way across SoHo, I spotted this car in traffic on Broadway at Prince Street. My first thought was that it was a really cool custom paint job on a car, and I was appreciating it from an artistic point of view. But when I shared the picture with my oldest son, who loves cars and car culture, he said it is more likely a case of a prototype for a particular car model and that they use the crazy paint job to obscure details of the car design so that other companies won’t steal those ideas. He sent a screenshot of something related that referred to this practice as “dazzle camouflage,” and I thought that was a great term!
The screenshot he sent me states “Why do prototype cars have weird paint jobs? The crazy patterns are used to hide potential changes in the car’s design, sometimes covering the entire car.” That would certainly be the case here, since the pattern even covers the windows (as you can see below), most likely to stop people from seeing inside to see whatever design ideas are going on in there.
At any rate, I think it’s a cool design and a funky look, I’d have fun driving a car that looked like that!