L1's Garage

Satin charcoal black or rear end me black, pick the name you prefer.

P.S. it’s surely a wrap so if you hit the 3M or other famous wrap makers website you’re gonna find it immediately.

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^^^ pretty sure mkbhd did a matte black wrap and rich rebuilds did a gret

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Amazing. Where did it get this nickname?

I just needed the satin charcoal black name so I could give it to aptera for their wrapping process

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Funny if this doesn’t age well as more automation comes and some wrap actually messes with lidar and camera inputs of various vendors and it really causes this lol.

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Amazing. I definitely want the one that absorbs cop lidar and radar and fucks with it

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The aptera has very very little metal in it past the drive train. It’s almost entirely. Carbon fiber and composites. Which is awesome… it also makes it radar opaque/absorbent. If I could get wraps and paint that make that even better. I’m so down for the stealth car

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My own creation after a dumbass I couldn’t see almost sideswiped me in a parking lot driving in a whatever shitbox wrapped like that. It was an unlit parking lot and this kid thought that their DRL were enough to just drive at night.

This is just a generic name. A wrap like that is surely stocked by different companies in different “flavours”. Some are a bit more satin, some a bit more gloss, some thicker, some thinner. Ask for samples if they give you the choice between different brands.

Luckly most car manufacturer are not idiots and do not rely on just cameras for depth perception. Lidar, much like a ToF camera, is not really affected by satin objects. It’s much harder to determine the disance of a glossy object, especially if there’s interference like the sun light. Funny enough the thesis I wrote for my bahcelor’s degree is about computer vision and spacial mapping.
tl;dr If you try to get away with one source of informations you’re bound to get screwed at some point.

Lidar you almost could if you choose one of those 99,999999% light absorption paints. Radar you can’t really absorb. You either engineer a vehicle that’s transparent to radar frequencies used by cop’s devices or litter the whole car with frequency generators able to produce distruptive interference. And if you wanted to be invisible with the latter they should be beamforming and be run by a pretty smart computer. Almost military tech stuff.

I would not be so quick to blame. My dad has issues with the auto lights on his car. Sometimes they only activate del and think it’s enough light and because the DRLs are so bright these days it’s hard to tell if that was the headlights

Composites absorb radar all the time (well attenuate is a better word) Last time I was engineering something for a radar… the anechoic chamber we used had composite dummy’s that we tested for the hell of it. Carbon fiber is very transparent. Radar just doesn’t easily see it at all and that’s predominantly what the car is made of. The metal parts are the electric drive train. It will still reflect for sure but it will be a scattering effect. I’m not doing it for that I just think it’s cool that the cars RCS will be much lower than other vehicles on the road. Particularly due to its curved aero dynamic shape

You know what will reflect though… the large under belly is metal due to needing to flow coolant through it

A good historical example is that Germany had wooden planes in service and their test flying wing was wood and it basically reflected no radar signature back.

You’re basically right, think about what radomes are made out of.
I wouldn’t want a low radar cross section vehicle on the road nowadays though because of the prevalence of radar cruise control equipped vehicles.

I’m down to cause havoc though :joy:

They thought of this though. They have active sensors and panels in the aptera design that beams something backward forward and side to side so that cars behind and ahead can see it via their own assist stuff.

Doubt it would have passed road tests without it

I’d imagine all the stuff underneath the aptera’s composite structure would do a pretty good job at reflecting radar too… like the problem modern LO aircraft have.

I thought the active sensors and transceivers on the aptera where going to be for some kind of future V2V thing?
Which I think has more of a future than the current paradigm of solelyr-relying-on-your-own-sensors based approach to automated driving.

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Basically none of the chassis is metal yes

The only thing that is… is the under belly and the drive train. So yeah those would reflect. Think I said that above. They focused heavily on a majority composite vehicle and eliminated metal everywhere possible. Which is cool. I can get behind pushing new materials

Yes that’s what they say. Idk what the future if that is. Hell with the debt crisis looming idk what the future if any legislation is

But even little things like the metal door hinges, antennae and window defroster traces would return plenty of radar assuming we’re talking about wavelengths that will resolve on those features like anything shorter than L band.
The super low to the ground metal stuff might not be a good candidate for the radar returns because it’ll bleed into the clutter suppression more.

Yeah you’re right, legislation is probably going to have an outsized affect on the future of that technology more than the merits of the technologies themselves.

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It’s fuckin sad. I can’t get tax benefits either btw… everyone else gets one but three wheelers do not

How blatantly arbitrary and what a giant smelly pile of bullshit

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Lmao what?

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I don’t know about you but when I got my driving license they thought me to look at the gauge after you peel away. To be fair they even told me to always do a walk around the car to make sure everything is alright, but that’s way too much for a car I drive every day and know full well the state of. A car is a tool and you gotta use it properly. It’s also not the first time I saw that happen.

I think it got lost in the thread, what car are we talking about? I was thinking about the average car that’s made out of steel or aluminium. But I’d be curious to see what would be the difference in pick up pattern in you try to radar supercar all made out of composits vs a normal car.
I think frequency matters too, but I’ll let you tell me.

Those are usually big hunks of metal, I figure it would reflect a good signature.

Yeah, I figured it was just for the fun of thinking about it. I’m also definitely not a cop, so you have nothing to worry about.

The battery pack will for sure! Those usually span all the lenght of the car from front to back.

Wanna drive a wooden car? You would need to pedal it down the road with your own legs though hahaha

Although people grow up in different cultures, one thing will always be consistent: people like stylish fast cars

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