Gojirra99

Tokyo, Japan, Apr 5, 2006 - (JCN Newswire) - TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION (TMC) announced today that it has completed introduction of metallic water-borne paint for the top coat painting process at all nine TMC vehicle body paint lines in Japan, greatly promoting measures to reduce emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Capping an effort that started with the introduction of water-borne paint - hich is more environmentally friendly than conventional paint - or the top coat painting process at its Takaoka Plant in August 1999, TMC recently introduced water-borne paint for the top coat process at its Motomachi Plant. This has resulted in an average VOC emission level of 30g/m2 (unit of weight per painted surface area) across all lines, compared to 55g/m2 in FY2000, or a 45% reduction, enabling TMC to meet its FY2005 goal to reduce VOC emissions to an "average of 35g/m2 or less on all lines", as stipulated in the Third Toyota Environmental Action Plan (FY2001-2005).

Toyota has long been actively implementing initiatives to reduce VOCs, which generate suspended particulate matter and photochemical oxidants, both of which are thought to contribute to atmospheric pollution and negatively affect human health. The shift from organic-solvent paints to water-borne paints in the vehicle body painting process, which is one of the major sources of VOC emissions in automobile manufacturing, is an important step in promoting further reduction of VOCs.

TMC intends to reduce VOCs even more - the Fourth Toyota Environmental Action Plan (FY2006-2010) states a FY2010 goal to reduce VOC emissions to an average of 25g/m2 or less on all paint lines, and, to achieve this goal, TMC is currently expanding introduction of water-borne paints to the vehicle body surfacer coat (middle coat) painting process and to bumper painting lines.

source : theautochannel

BobsGX

And you thought the paint on Lexus vehicles chipped easily from stones now. Wait and see how easy this latest paint technique will chip.

picus

Yep - they'll be more runs, orange peel, thin spots, and flake variation too. Water-based paint is kind of the achilles heal of good looking / durable car paint.

toy4two

Its amazing a metallic Toyota from the early 90's has a much better paintjob then today's 50,000 lexus cars

nthach

My mom's Sienna is all chipped to hell now. Toyota uses PPG EnviroBase paint. Funny, VW's Glasurit waterbase paint holds up much better than this PPG stuff...

mmarshall

Waterborne paint is nothing new. Saturn has used it on their plastic-body-paneled vehicles since 1990. It expands,contracts, and bends along with these panels...one reason for its widespread on this type of vehicle despite its expense. Many body shops won't use it because of the expense...they just repaint Saturns conventionally.
And you can't say it is a second rate paint job either. I had a 90's vintage Saturn SL-2, brand-new....it was the shiniest paint job on any car I ever owned, but tended to scratch easily.
Several of you brought up the subject of paint chips. My experience is that waterborne paint is neither more or less resistant to this than any other type of auto finish.