Here’s How Automakers Design Test-Car Camouflage To Hide Precious Secrets

If you want to build the world’s newest and most exciting washing machine you can test it in a lab until it’s time to release it. People do not treat cars like they treat washing machines. People do way worse things to their cars which means you have to test a new car out in the real world where everyone has a camera connected to the Internet in their pocket. Adding camouflage to disguise a test car is not a life-and-death matter in the same way hiding a tank is, but as a car designer I took the task just as seriously. Here’s how my team did it.

Cars are by some margin the most complex consumer grade products you can buy. Think about it; at least 3000 individual parts made of different materials; various alloys, plastics, rubbers and fabrics make up intricate systems that all have to work together seamlessly to make sure the thing doesn’t rattle itself apart, keeps its occupants safe and comfortable and fulfill its intended function of fitting into your life and enabling you to get shit done with a minimum of fuss. It has to get by on minimal maintenance, hopefully be nice to look at and easy to operate, affordable to purchase and be stamped out by the thousand on tiny profit margins with no variation in quality. Oh, and if it will start every morning that’d be peachy. The modern passenger vehicle is an engineering miracle.

It’s Hard To Camouflage A Car Without Affecting Its Functionality

Successfully achieving all of this is why it takes four or five years to get a car from swishy sketch to something you can walk into a showroom and plonk down a check for. Getting there takes an enormous engineering effort and countless hours of testing both real and virtual, in labs and workshops and on the private test track. But, at some point, the rubber quite literally has to hit the road.

With a washing machine, so long as it doesn’t leak, can complete a prescribed number of wash cycles over its lifetime and doesn’t explode when you load it with knickers and detergent you’re probably good to ship. This can all be tested in a secure lab away from prying eyes. Prototype cars need to be tested, tweaked, calibrated and generally flogged to death in extreme climate environments that would have sane people booking the next flight back to civilization. Test drivers try to kill a car to make sure it doesn’t kill you.

Initial road testing and component validation will be done on private test tracks, secluded from the gaze of people who want to splash your new model over their front-page years before you’re ready to show it. Hacked up development mules are built to test the engineering components, usually under whatever existing body can be butchered to fit, but eventually you need to start driving the actual car on real roads. In the past, scoop photographers needed insider knowledge, patience and a very long lens; these days smartphones and the internet have turned watchful enthusiasts into new model paparazzi.

One for the LR spotters. What’s this thing, then? pic.twitter.com/du5vjTA0YS

— Jethro Bovingdon (@JethroBovingdon) April 10, 2019

Everything concerned with the appearance of a car, whether interior or exterior, falls within the purview of the design studio, that highly secure sanctum buried deep within an OEM’s R&D center. Designers are even responsible for the camouflage used to disguise a new model’s appearance until it’s time for the grand reveal as a climax to a long marketing strip tease. The problem is the designers and marketing team want to hide as much as possible; the engineering and test teams want to hide as little as possible, because anything attached to the sheet metal affects its performance and test results. Want to cover up your trick new air vents? Yeah, you’re impacting the performance of the cooling system. Hiding that spoiler? Now the aero is fouled up. See the problem?

Here’s What Goes Into Prototype Camo

Prototype camo consists of three main parts. Vacuum molded hard parts riveted to body work to hide the overall form, foam pieces stuck to the bodywork to confuse the surfacing, and the wrap which covers the whole thing in a psychedelic pattern meant to fool eyeballs and cameras into misreading the shape. Metal mesh and ABS plastic sheets will be slapped over vents and light graphics to cover their shape without sacrificing too much functionality.

When the job of designing camo lands on the junior designer’s desk (this was one of my first jobs upon getting hired), the first thing to understand is exactly what parts of the car need to be hidden. Our new car was extremely distinctive and was also probably one of the most feverishly anticipated new releases in years. Everybody and their dog wanted to know what we had up our sleeves – we knew it would be snapped the moment the first prototypes rolled out of the gates.

What We Tried To Hide

By this stage you have the final production data (there’s always last-minute tweaks for tiny detail stuff), so you drop that into rendering software like Autodesk VRED and once you have your standard three views (front and rear three quarter, side view), you can simply Photoshop over the top some ideas for the hard parts. We needed to hide our distinctive shoulder, hood shape and roof line. So I mocked up some long pieces that would sit below the window line and square off the shape of the top of the body side, a big clamshell to cover the entire hood, and a wedge shape part that would sit at the top of the windshield to hide the dipping roof line.

Once these have been reviewed by managers and approved, it’s off to meet the prototype team to see if the disguise is feasible, and doable within the budget they have. The number of actual development vehicles on the road will depend on the size and scope of the test program. Our new car needed to be tested on and off road extensively, sometimes to destruction. The test fleet was about 100 cars, deployed all over the world. And they all need their appearance hidden. These cars were what is known as the pilot builds – assembled in a special dedicated facility to allow production line managers to figure out how to actually bolt the thing together and work out the procedures the line workers would follow to assemble customer vehicles. Because these cars are probably something like 95% what customers can buy and prototypes unable to be sold, using them as test vehicles gives them a perfect second lease of life.

The light graphics on our car were unique and unlike anything else on the road, and as a design team we were rightly proud of them and didn’t want to show them until launch. Luckily, you can hide a lot of the actual lit element and still remain legal, as long as you have all the functions visible. The problem was our headlights were not flush to the body work – they were inset with quite a lot of depth and a complicated shape. We covered them with clear plastic and then extended the wrap to cover the top and bottom, meaning only a thin lateral strip of headlight was visible. A similar approach was used at the back with the taillights. Because the indicators and brake lights were contained in the outer elements, we were able to cover most of the main lamp with a sheet of ABS.

Some manufacturers have a bit of fun with the wrap and use humorous imagery or try to make their car look like someone else’s. As the car heads towards reveal the wrap might be changed (or have stickers added over the top) at the behest of marketing to start building social media buzz. We just used a generic swirl in black and white, probably because it had been used before and there was still several miles of the stuff still lying around. There are still further opportunities for deception, though. Once the hard parts and the wrap pattern are decided you can play around with blocking out graphics in black spray paint – to trick people into thinking your design has shapes and visual features it doesn’t actually have. I spent a few days Photoshopping various wheel arch shapes, grille patterns and vent openings in the wrong place onto a render of the wrapped and disguised car for approval. One alternative I mocked up had a seven bar grille as I thought this would show we had a sense of humor about one of our main competitors and be good PR. The studio chief had a good laugh and agreed with me before saying “no.”

Usually wheels will be painted black as well to hide the design. We were horrified inside the studio when our car was papped with one of its signature alloys unpainted. But this is the problem – people involved outside of the studio are not as concerned with keeping a new car’s appearance a secret as the design team are. Engineers generally consider designers a nuisance at best and one step up from the lobby flower arrangers at worst. One old hand on the test drive team thought he could bully the new designer (me) into leaving all the car’s glazing unwrapped, quite shirtily suggesting I didn’t know my ass from my elbow when I said the windows needed to be covered as much as was possible. Wrapping the glazing not only hides the DLO shape, but also keeps the interior hidden. Obviously you can’t cover the windshield, but rear side glass and rear windshield are fair game, as long as the drivers can see out safely.

The Camo Really Does Help Keep The Design Secret

So the first cars emerge for hundreds of thousands of miles of punishment like a wheeled Scooby-Doo villain, their true nature shrouded in mystery. These days it generally doesn’t take the forum detectives too long to figure out exactly what they are looking at, but even as testing progresses and the hard parts slowly have to be removed (to get more accurate results) the wrap is enough to confuse even the most dedicated Photoshop amateur. Our design remained secret right up until a contract painter snapped a model in a paint booth one weekend, just days before launch.

I became the go-to guy for camo in our studio, and the next car I worked on had a sister car that was about a year ahead in development, which was already up and running around covered up on public roads. Because our version was a type of car we had never done before, we were REALLY keen to keep people guessing. The sister car was a BEV like ours, but the press had been rumoring ICE versions were being considered. A quick meeting with the studio on the other side of the building confirmed yes, we could use their hard parts on our car. The game was afoot. Not only would those parts make our car look like one of theirs, but we could also mockup some fake exhaust tips to make it look like the non-existent ICE version the press was speculating about.

The best part was because we were tight with the DVLA (the UK equivalent of the DMV) we could register and plate our cars as those of our sister brand as well, meaning that anyone looking up the registration number would be looking at factually incorrect information from an official government website. Ultimately all this fun and games was for nothing as both were unceremoniously cancelled at the 11th hour before they’d even got out into the open, which for any designer is the real kick in the teeth.