How Ford foils spies with custom paint jobs on test vehicles

Car paparazzi make their bread and butter hanging out where all the world’s car makers test their prototypes on the road and all it takes is just one glimpse and a snap of a smartphone camera to reveal an unreleased design to the world. Not in the case of Ford’s new test rides though as they’re rolling out a bizarre camouflage paint scheme that consists of a multi-layered swath of randomly strewn cylinders that foil attempts to make heads or tails of the design with a naked eyeball much less a camera.

Dubbed the “Brick”, the design is printed on vinyl stickers that are then applied on each test vehicle before it hits the road for live testing. The stickers shown are designed for winter environments in Europe while testbeds in Australia and South America will use sand colours.

“I tried to create a design which is chaotic and that confuses the eyes,” said Marco Porceddu, vehicle prototype engineer, Product Development, Ford of Europe, who developed the new camouflage. “I researched optical illusions on the internet and came up with a shape that could be copied and overlapped thousands of times. This creates both an optical illusion and a 3D effect.” Well, it certainly works, that’s for sure.