The paint shop at a modern car assembly plant can be 50% of the square footage under the roof, and cost 50% of the outlay, so half a billion for a new one at least.
The change from VOC-borne to water-based paints was also a big deal for the environment. The lacquers did a good job, but imagine living in a neighborhood where several tons of toluene or acetone was being evaporated into your air every hour. In places like LA, this process was a huge contributor to smog in the 1960s/70s.
I used to work in an automotive paint shop. When our exhaust scrubber (burner) went down, we had to stop painting cars. We had a 'budget' of VOC exhaust per year. I don't know when that went in, I imagine in the 80's or 90's.
We switched to water based paints in 2013 and that really helped with the VOC.
My neighbour was a car painter for decades he died of dementia. My Dad and grandfather had a house painting business in the 1960s/1970s using leaded paint for most of that time. Both Dad and my grandfather died of lung diseases.
Acetone is not a VOC.
Also, Don't confuse VOC, which is about air pollution, with toxicity, which is not. Toluene is a very slow evaporating VOC that is toxic. Not all VOC are toxic and not all toxic solvents used in coatings are VOCs.
Most 2k water based urethanes with isocyanate hardeners are ~zero VOC (and colorless + odorless at less than harmful concentrations) but much more toxic to those spraying and within inhalation range. Thankfully we are moving to iso free formulations.
It happens that the isocyanate reacts with moisture in air fast enough that it won't harm many others but again, VOC != Toxicity.
I would rather have non toxic air pollution than colorless odorless toxic gas, and there are plenty of examples of VOC regulation generating the second.
It's one of the fun lies that paint companies sell (0 voc = safer for you. Non VOC is good for environment in general but tells you nothing about safety)
Acetone is absolutely a volatile organic compound (VOC). It might not be toxic, but it's an organic solvent with a high vapor pressure at relatively low temperatures.
Scientifically, yes, but it is exempt from almost all regulation as a VOC.
Since the definition here is the regulatory one, it is not a VOC as we're talking about.
It is the main carrier in almost all solvent borne VOC compliant formulations of coatings
As a result, for example, roughly all solvent borne wood coatings that are VOC compliant use acetone these days.
This has fun effects.
They used to use, mostly (but it varies a bit), n-butyl acetate.
Of course, acetone flashes off way too quickly, making it almost impossible to get coatings to level and flow properly. So the real result is that the coatings are made higher solids and then get reduced by the user with a significant amount of VOC (toluene, NBA) so they are usable again.
So sold VOC compliant but not really in practice, and everyone looks the other way because they don't really generate enough pollution to be worth cracking down[1].
[1] Moving to water borne is expensive and tricky. For example:
They mostly spray conversion varnish which is cheap and easy, and resistant to almost all chemicals. Consumers want cabinets/etc that don't get stained when you get ketchup or wine on them.
In water borne, they'd have to spray 2k urethane to get the same resistance, but doing so safely requires supplied air setups that are quite expensive, at least until iso-free formulations get better.
On the other hand, at least the early water-base painted cars were prone to premature rusting, which has its own (distributed) ecological impact. My W210 Mercedes was mechanically great the day I sent it to the scrapper for excessive rust through on the rockers and underbody structure. Hundreds of thousands of car met such an earlier than otherwise demise.
Glad you liked yours; the 210s and 220s and the original MLs were the nadir of Mercedes value-engineering when it came to many things, and rustproofing was certainly one of them.
What? The W210 is the "Toyota Camry" of Mercedes-Benz. One of their most reliable cars. Yes, however, once rust got a start you could almost watch them disintegrate. Toyotas of the 1980s and 1990s were similar in that regard.
The M112 18-valve V6 is not really considered the pinnacle of M-B gas engine tech; and the interior is certainly not what lots of people expected from a Benz, certainly if you had just stepped out of a '94 500E W124. The body when prepped right is comfortable and sturdy tho. I'm sure it was heavily used in much of the world as a taxi, like a Camry (except with an M-B turbodiesel).
A good endorsement of it is that the Chrysler LX cars, which shared more than a few W210/211 bits, have been on sale with only cosmetic updates since 2005...
I had the OM606A, which was very well-regarded overall and mine went to 211K miles with no drama and the occasional glow plug was the only unscheduled maintenance I experienced in almost a decade of my ownership.
Interesting. It's still difficult to purchase in CA. Used to be sold at Home Depot, now it's "Acetone replacement". I have to go to specialty suppliers.
And Tesla is famous for trying things evrybody else knows are either stupid or just don't work economically when it comes to manufacturing cars. They sell it pretty well so, usually as some groundbreaking innovation of sorts, one that miraculiosly justifies the over hyped shares and cars.
Not that Teslas are bad cars, far from it, but tue delta between perception and substance is larger than anything German "Premium" OEMs could have ever dreamed of.
The change from VOC-borne to water-based paints was also a big deal for the environment. The lacquers did a good job, but imagine living in a neighborhood where several tons of toluene or acetone was being evaporated into your air every hour. In places like LA, this process was a huge contributor to smog in the 1960s/70s.