Customer
Leading Indian Automotive Accessories and Parts Coatings Manufacturer (Name withheld)

Challenge
This manufacturer supplies high-gloss black coatings for exterior automotive parts and export-oriented accessories. They were facing:

• Escalating pigment costs driven by imported specialty carbon black grades
• Variability in gloss and jetness under different cure temperatures, leading to rework and rejected lots
• Extended dispersion cycles, especially on high-jet, high-gloss formulations, limiting line capacity and on-time delivery

The customer needed a pigment solution that could deliver “showroom black” appearance with tight control over gloss and colour while reducing production cost.

Solution
ICI Carbon recommended migrating from the incumbent carbon black to a combination approach:

• AUTO COAT as the primary jetness driver in high-gloss topcoats
• Process optimization to exploit AUTO COAT’s faster dispersion and tighter particle size distribution

ICI’s lab collaborated with the customer to:

• Optimize pigment loading and grind time to hit target jetness and gloss at lower overall pigment usage
• Validate performance across various bake schedules and substrates (ABS, PP with primer, metal accessories)
• Establish robust QC specifications around ΔL*, gloss, and haze for production-scale monitoring

Results

Post-implementation, the customer documented:

• 27% reduction in pigment cost per litre of finished high-gloss black coating
• 13% improvement in jetness (ΔL*), delivering a noticeably deeper, more uniform black with excellent DOI (distinctness of image)
• 32% shorter dispersion time, enabling higher batch turnover and greater responsiveness to export orders

The new formulation based on AUTO COAT has become the customer’s standard for premium black automotive accessories and is now specified in their export catalogues.