Sounds trivial, doesn’t it? Paint the roof in another colour. And yet Opel turned exactly that into a quiet revolution inside its own factory. We’re talking about the two-tone versions of the Grandland with the black roof — the configuration six out of ten buyers actually pick. And it’s for those six that Opel rewrote the paint process at its plant in Eisenach, Germany.
The new technology is called monocoat. The old way was straight out of the textbook: base coat, infrared and hot-air drying, then clear coat, then drying again. Now the two stages are fused into one. And the figures are striking: the plant saves around 80,000 litres of water every month, and CO&sub2; emissions on site could drop by 580 tonnes a year. This isn’t cosmetic tweaking. This is a serious overhaul of the process.
But water isn’t the only thing Opel is counting. Thermal energy per production hour is down by 150 kW, electricity by more than 500 kW. There’s less solvent in the air, less paint sludge to deal with. Eisenach has become the first Stellantis site in Europe where this method runs not as a pilot but as part of regular production.
And all of this for a model that’s already trying hard to be green. The Grandland is already offered in electrified flavours, including the Grandland Electric Long Range and the all-wheel-drive Grandland Electric AWD. Inside, Opel pushes in the same direction: fabrics and surfaces on the seats, door panels, dashboard and centre console are made from material derived from PET bottles. The result is an oddly satisfying picture — a premium-class crossover where even the way the roof gets painted has gone green.
Earlier, Opel unveiled a police-spec Grandland at the GPEC exhibition in Leipzig.
