Across sectors, businesses have come to assume that customers won’t pay more for sustainable products. This is especially true in cost-intensive industries, such as automotive repair, where rising parts and labour costs, technician shortages and increasingly complex vehicles are putting sustained pressure on repair economics. In the United Kingdom, rising operational costs, taxes and bills are expected to be the biggest obstacle for 92% of vehicle repairers in 2026. 

At the same time, this landscape is evolving from one mainly driven by cost and cycle time to one increasingly concerned with its environmental impact. Insurers, repair shops and manufacturers must now comply with a growing number of sustainability-related regulations, from the European Union’s End-of-Life Vehicles Regulation to the Consumer Code in France. 

Axalta Coating Systems, a global supplier of liquid and powder coatings for industrial applications, tries to reduce the carbon footprint of automative repair by focusing on a procedure that occurs in over 74% of all repair jobs: painting. In fact, painting is one of the most time-consuming, energy-intensive and carbon-intensive operations in post-collision repair, contributing to approximately 15% to 20% of the total carbon footprint. 

Traditionally, paint systems entail multiple coatings of different products, waiting time between coats and between different finishing layers, as well as high-temperature baking cycles. Rethinking this process could lower the environmental impact and, at the same time, improve productivity and reduce operating costs. Rather than just developing more sustainable paint, Axalta reviewed the refinishing process. 

The economics behind the strategy

Compared with conventional paint solutions, Axalta’s Fast Cure technology nearly halves the time required and reduces baking temperature from about 60°C to 20°C. Instead of relying on heat to speed up drying and curing, it invests in R&D and lets the chemistry do the work, eliminating waiting time between layers of the same product as subsequent layers can now be applied on a wet layer.  

In an industry that’s under both cost and time pressure, time is money. Customers want their cars back as soon as possible; repair shops want to turn around as many cars as possible. To illustrate the improved efficiency, a car body repair shop operating an eight-hour shift can increase throughput from about seven vehicles per day to nearly 18, dramatically improving utilisation of one of its most expensive assets: the paint booth. The refinish coating not only reduces the energy required in the process, but also makes economic sense. Although it costs nearly twice as much as conventional paints, it requires fewer coats and less labour time, decreasing total painting costs. 

Delivering this value proposition, however, calls for more than product innovation – it requires orchestrating an entire ecosystem. No single participant in the automotive repair value chain could independently validate, implement and scale the solution. Axalta therefore worked with insurers, repair networks, technology providers and automotive software solutions company Solera, each contributing complementary capabilities: Repair networks tested the solution in real operating conditions, insurers assessed its economic impact, and Solera provided the operational data and methodology to quantify the business and environmental outcomes. 

By aligning participants around shared evidence rather than individual claims, adoption barriers were reduced and deployment was accelerated across the repair ecosystem. 

Making sustainability claims credible

Fortunately, operational improvements such as shorter repair times and lower costs are visible to car body repair shops. But environmental performance isn’t. Where sustainability reporting is concerned, independent and credible measurements are needed to quantify the environmental impact of repair operations every step of the way.

By tapping on Solera’s global Sustainable Estimatics platform, Axalta could demonstrate that its technology reduces carbon emissions by about 65%. Combining operational-claims data with industry-specific measurements for carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e)  – the common unit used to express the global warming impact of different greenhouse gases – the platform provides standardised, auditable CO2e data that insurers, repairers, fleet operators and Axalta can incorporate into their sustainability reports.

Bart de Groof, Vice President of Global Refinish Marketing at Axalta, noted at a recent INSEAD Business Sustainability webinar: "The value isn't that we can say the product is more sustainable. The value is being able to prove it with a credible, operational methodology that our customers trust."

Taking this one step further, Solera’s platform with a huge database of CO2e emissions across the vehicle repair life cycle doesn’t just monitor environmental impact for sustainability reporting. The platform is in itself a decision-support tool that can help users answer practical questions such as whether to repair or replace a part, balancing providing the most cost-effective solution with the goal of minimising CO2e emissions. Overall, it can help businesses make better-informed decisions and understand their sustainability performance with more granularity: at the claim level, operational level and repair shop level.

Growth powered by sustainability

“Sustainability only creates real value when it goes hand in hand with performance, efficiency and profitability,” said de Groof at the webinar. Rather than positioning sustainability as an add-on benefit that customers must pay for, the company redesigned its product and application process so that better environmental performance comes with stronger economics. Despite its higher price, customers’ willingness to pay increased when the company demonstrated that sustainability can eventually pay for itself. Today, the company is winning customers across highly competitive car body repair shop networks.

Sustainable innovations can scale when companies make bold moves beyond their traditional product design and go-to-market models. Combining product innovation with data analytics, the partnership between Axalta and Solera created more than a sustainable coating. It created a stronger business model – one that turns data, partnership and sustainability into a source of competitive advantage.