Richard Porter on why cars might as well be sprayed in chocolate

My wife’s car suffered a mysterious ding that hacked a big chunk of paint from the edge of the driver’s door. Worse still, her car is black, so it looks cack. And as I was getting ready to repair this, something dawned on me: paint is a bloody stupid thing in which to finish cars.

Yes, I know we like to have a choice in bodywork colour, but if you want your car to stay looking nice you will curse paint because it’s a daft thing in which to wrap an object that moves at speed through all weathers, comes into close proximity with other metal objects, and most likely gets left outside all the time. You might as well spray cars in chocolate.

> The most dangerous trip of my life: 5000 miles across Siberia in a Porsche

Question is, if we don’t use paint to cover and colour our cars, what do we use? Given what cars have to go through and what rigours they’re exposed to, what we need here is one of the toughest substances in the known world. And that gives us a few options.

Option 1: Do you remember those stickers they used to slap on the cases of new CDs? God, they were annoying. You know the ones: bright circle on the front that excitedly told you the disc inside contained that song that was just in the charts/featured in a recent movie, or informed you that the price had been marked down/would be heavily reduced as long as you bought two other CDs which, if you were a man in your early 30s, you were going to do anyway.

So you got home, stuck on one of the three CDs, oh alright one of the six CDs you’d just bought and sat there trying to take off the sticker. But you couldn’t. Oh sure, the front bit with the writing on it – ‘As heard in Bridget Jones’s Diary 4: Mission to Moscow!’ – might come off in frustrating little strips. But the gummy part behind it, that wasn’t going anywhere unless you had access to one of those flamethrower things they use to remove road markings.

Whatever it was that stuck stickers to CDs when CDs were a thing, that’s the stuff we need. They must have loads of it going spare now that no one buys compact discs any more, so dump some colouring into it and that’s what cars get dunked in before all the seats and engines and whathaveyou are fitted. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to make the bodywork bulletproof as well.

Option 2: It’s an extreme one, this, because it’s genuinely the hardest substance in the universe, harder than diamonds and silicon carbide and your partner’s elbow when it accidentally contacts your ribs across the bed in the middle of the night. That’s right, I’m suggesting we bin off paint and cover every brand new car in a thin layer of leftover Weetabix.

I’m not sure of the mechanics of this, I think Ford or Toyota or whoever might need to apply the Weetabix wet then leave the bodyshells by the sink all day while they’re out at work. If they do, then hey presto, a coating so absolutely impenetrable that nothing will be able to get it off.

Yes, I can see some issues, such as the constant risk of a low-speed licking from a stray dog and/or toddler, but just think of the stone chip resistance. You could drive through a tornado and that bodywork wouldn’t look any different to the day it was first slathered with milky breakfast cereal.

I was pleased with this idea, but then I had another one. You see, the driver’s door on my wife’s car wasn’t just chipped. Somehow it had also picked up an annoyingly obvious dent on the trailing edge. Which reminded me that it’s not just stupid to cover cars in paint, it’s also idiotic that, by and large, they’re made out of metal. Heavy, dentable, expensive-to-repair metal. What are we thinking?

In order to stave off a trip to the bodyshop, I went instead to see my mate Jack, who has some bodywork tools and a machine polisher and is much better at this stuff than me. It was Jack who had a brilliant idea to tap the dent out using a small hammer and, as a strong but not ruinously strong buffer, the thing that’s given me my solution to the car construction of the future: a Lego brick.

Why aren’t cars made out of the same thick, durable, non-chipping, non-flaking, fade-resistant, dent-resistant plastic they use to make Lego? No more knackered paintwork, no more irksome car park dings, and it already comes in a range of jaunty colours. It’s quite light too.

Based on the four minutes of thought I’ve given this, I can see no problems with this plan except for one: whatever you do, don’t get up in the night for a wee and accidentally step on your car. If you do you’ll be howling louder than a man who borrowed his wife’s car to run some errands and let the wind blow the door into a wall.

This story was first featured in evo issue 321.