News Releases

BASF opened a new laboratory building for the development of automotive refinish coatings and innovations beyond paint at its site in Münster, Germany. It underlines the Coatings division’s global position as a future-oriented and innovative company. “It is another component of our positioning as a global innovation center of BASF Coatings. We are thus complementing a series of global technical innovations. This includes the ‘Lean Lab’, which we started operating in 2018 at this site, as well as our plant for the functionalization of films for various industries,” highlighted Uta Holzenkamp, head of BASF’s Coatings division.

Designers for BASF’s Coatings division have delved into new color spaces for the 2021-2022 Automotive Color Trends collection. Borrowing a phenomenon from quantum mechanics, this year’s collection is called SUPERPOSITION, which is a state where the limitation of binary systems is overcome.

With the “BASF Color Report for Automotive OEM Coatings”, BASF’s Coatings division provides a global analysis of the color distribution in the 2018 automotive market. The achromatic colors – white, black, gray and silver – still dominate the roads. They cover almost 80% of cars produced worldwide. White is the most popular color among them.

Ten years ago, the Color Design Studio Europe at BASF’s Münster site was opened as a competence center for designing new color concepts for the automotive industry. The building features an open design in the Bauhaus style. Here, the designers of BASF’s Coatings division translate technological and social trends into automotive colors and discuss their approaches with the automotive manufacturers’ design departments.

With AUROOM, BASF’s Coatings division introduces a digital platform which enables OEM designers to access a database of photo-realistic virtual car colors. BASF’s virtual colors capture all facets of automotive coatings including lightness flop, color flop and sparkling. By mapping these colors on car models, OEM designers can virtually paint every color proposal and gain realistic impressions of colors and effects on a complete car already in an early design phase. AUROOM will be a valuable tool for OEM designers to speed up and perfect the overall color design process as they are no longer solely dependent on physical samples that need to be painted and shipped. AUROOM provides further innovative features like real-time side by side comparison of different color shades of the same color group to make the right color decision easier.