Nissan ‘Self-Cleaning’ Car Is Not As Badass As It Sounds

I still have vivid memories of my first pair of Dockers stain-defender pants. I sported those pleated khakis everywhere, and challenged just about anyone with a cup of water to try and deface them. An untold amount of man hours were devoted to testing the quality of those pants, and through it all—as promised—those bastards endured. Even when the kid that despised me and my idolized slacks dumped a cup of boiling hot lukewarm tap water on my crotch, I laughed in his stupid face as it beaded up and pooled on the floor. I was the fuckin’ man.

That was ten years ago.

In the last decade, the appeal of the stain-defenders has since vanished, and while the once-coveted pants still inhabit the shelves of department stores nationwide, the simple fact is that no one gives a shit about the science behind them anymore. No one but Nissan, that is.

Nissan declares that they’ve developed the world’s first “self-cleaning” car. The term alone elicits images of a badass cruiser straight out of a sci-fi movie, but before you get too aroused, let me throw a little hot water on your crotch.

The self-cleaning car can’t even clean its own windshield.

The “self-cleaning” car does not magically scrub itself on command. There are no miniature soap-shooting cannons. There are no water-ejaculating sprinklers. And there are definitely no ShamWows attached to Inspector Gadget arms that emerge from the undercarriage. No, my friends, there are none of those things.

Instead, the so-called self-cleaning car has a paint coating that repels water, dirt and debris. Pretty revolutionary, you know, seeing as the issue of bird shit and dead bugs on your windshield still has to be addressed the old-fashioned way. Yes, manual labor is required to keep the self-cleaning car clean. Keep in mind that this comes from the company which claims to offer “Innovation That Excites.”

The “innovative” paint coating would be exciting. I’ll even go as far to say that it would be fuckin’ life changing—if and only if, Dockers didn’t have such a long-standing history of defending stains with similar technology. But, they do, and for that reason, the self-cleaning car is nothing but a stain on the pants of all that is good in this world.

I can already see myself loathing the innumerable amount of people who will go out of their way to demonstrate the liquid-repelling paint coating with a shaky YouTube video, however, as the Nissan self-cleaning car is currently just in the prototype phase, I am able to suspend my inevitable hatred for those people. For now, all we have is the video below, where you can watch as a half-coated Nissan Note tackles vicious brick roads and defends against the attacks of a couple microscopic puddles.