Honda USA has rolled out an initiative aimed to improve the company’s environmental impact and continue building its sustainable brand image. The automaker has released the first short film, ‘Paint by Numbers,’ showcasing Honda’s senior staff engineer, Shubho Bhattacharya, who develop technology to reduce energy consumption in the automobile body painting process. 

This film is the first one to cover Honda’s environmental innovations in North America. With this project, Honda emphasizes it’s goal to develop more fuel-efficient and low emissions vehicles as well as lessen the production impact on the environment.

«The largest amount of energy that’s consumed in a car factory is in the painting process,» explains Bhattacharya in the film. «In fact, the painting process consumes about 60 percent of a typical car factory’s energy consumption.» 

The Intelligent Paint Technology was invented by Bhattacharya in 2008 to reduce CO2 emissions from painting operations by approximately 25 percent. According to the company, it helps to reduce approximately 10,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year at Honda’s seven auto plants in North America. Two years earlier, Honda became the first automaker to announce voluntary CO2 emissions reduction targets for all its products. Last year, the company promised to reduce CO2 emissions until 2020.

For the last years Honda plants in North America have been have been leading in the energy efficiency, and have received the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Energy Star Award for energy efficiency for several times.

The No. 3 greenest brand in the world, according to Interbrand, Honda has been lead the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) rankings of overall vehicle environmental performance since 2000. In collaboration with IBM, Honda has been developing a new pilot project to allow communication between electric vehicles (EVs) and the power grid.