Auto companies are working tirelessly for a new model. A huge engineering work is going on in the background. Even though the cars under test belong to different segments or even different brands, they have a common feature.
This common feature is that all cars in testing are equipped with some form of camouflage. It’s no big secret that this is done to hide vehicles. However, the starting point is quite interesting.
In this example, you see Skoda’s ENYAQ iV, both with and without camouflage.
It is obvious that Skoda engineers did this work to hide the vehicle in the test phase. When we look at Skoda’s description, we see that they spent 120 hours just for the above camouflage.
Camouflage studies first came to the fore in the First World War.
After the heavy defeat against Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s army, France is considering ways to hide the ships and thus the first camouflage works are carried out. The artist Norman Wilkinson, who worked for the British navy at that time, used black and white colors to create “deceptive camouflage”, and around 4,000 ships with this camouflage are actively involved in the war. However, there is a great mystery at this point, there has never been any concrete proof that camouflaged ships work.
The leap of camouflage to the automotive industry took place in the 1950s.
The unauthorized release of photographs of prototype vehicles to newspapers causes a serious problem in the industry. Unauthorized shares, which only satisfied the consumers of the period, cause controversy among automobile manufacturers.
A German automotive newspaper called “Auto, motor und sport” shares photos of prototype vehicles without permission in its column called Erlkönige. These posts cause rival companies to see each other’s cars. The Erlkönige corner, which caused controversy among companies, causes the general name of camouflaged cars to be referred to as “erlkönige”. On this occasion, automobile engineers create different camouflage works and use them on the cars being tested.
Camouflage isn’t just for guns and cars. You can see the clearest example of this in this photo.
Surfers and divers also use camouflage from time to time. This is to avoid possible attacks by sharks.
Here are various examples of some camouflage work:
- Sources: Gomechanic, BMW, Skoda
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