In the canon of automotive design, comfort is usually synonymous with leather, wool, or high-tech synthetics. A new project from Australian creative agency TBWA\Eleven and creature effects specialists Odd Studio subverts this expectation with visceral intensity. The "Sunburnt Car" is upholstered entirely in a hyper-realistic silicone "skin" that mimics human flesh, complete with hair, freckles, and irregular moles. It is a design meant to provoke discomfort, bridging the gap between a vehicle and a biological organism.
The project's unsettling aesthetic serves a specific pedagogical purpose. Coated with photochromic inks — pigments that change color in response to ultraviolet light — the silicone interior reddens in real time, simulating a deepening sunburn across the dashboard and seats. By making the invisible radiation of the Australian sun visible, the designers aim to dismantle the "protective bubble" myth: the common misconception among drivers that car windows offer a total shield against UV damage. Commissioned by mycar Tyre & Auto, the installation addresses a stark public health reality in Australia, which has the world's highest rates of skin cancer. Research conducted for the campaign indicates that 70 percent of Australians believe they are safe from UV exposure while driving.
Design as Confrontation
The Sunburnt Car belongs to a lineage of design interventions that weaponize discomfort for public health messaging. The approach borrows from body horror — a genre more commonly associated with film and sculpture — and transplants it into the mundane context of a car interior. The effect is deliberately uncanny: the seats and surfaces look close enough to human skin to trigger recognition, but the context is wrong enough to unsettle.
Odd Studio, the creature effects house behind the project, brings a background rooted in practical effects for film and television. The studio's expertise in fabricating lifelike prosthetics and animatronics translates directly into the fidelity of the silicone surfaces. Every pore, follicle, and blemish is rendered with enough realism to collapse the psychological distance between the viewer and the message. This is not abstraction or metaphor; it is a literal skin stretched over a steering wheel.
The use of photochromic materials adds a temporal dimension that static installations lack. Rather than presenting a fixed image of damage, the car performs its warning in real time. Exposure to sunlight triggers the color shift, so the longer the vehicle sits under UV radiation, the more severe the simulated burn becomes. The material resets when removed from light, making the demonstration repeatable and, in a public setting, participatory. Passersby can watch the effect unfold, which gives the installation a narrative quality — a beginning, middle, and worsening.
The Windshield Problem
The campaign targets a gap in public understanding that has practical consequences. Standard automotive glass does block most UVB radiation, the wavelength primarily responsible for surface-level sunburn. However, UVA rays — which penetrate deeper into the skin and are closely associated with long-term damage and melanoma risk — pass through side and rear windows with far less attenuation. Windshields, which are typically laminated, offer better UVA protection than tempered side windows, but the distinction is not widely known among drivers. The result is an asymmetric exposure pattern: dermatological studies have long documented higher rates of skin damage on the right side of the body in countries where drivers sit on the left, and vice versa.
In Australia, where long commutes under intense sunlight are routine and outdoor sun-safety culture is well established, the car interior represents a blind spot — both literal and behavioral. The Sunburnt Car does not propose a product solution or a policy change. It operates purely at the level of perception, attempting to make a known but underappreciated risk feel immediate and physical.
Whether visceral provocation translates into sustained behavioral change remains an open question in public health communication. Shock-based campaigns have a mixed record: they tend to generate attention and short-term awareness but can fade quickly once the stimulus is removed. The tension for projects like the Sunburnt Car lies between the potency of a single confrontational moment and the slow, habitual nature of the behavior it seeks to alter — applying sunscreen before a daily commute, or investing in UV-filtering window tints. The installation makes the invisible visible. Whether visibility alone is sufficient to change what people do behind the wheel is a different problem entirely.
With reporting from Dezeen.
Source · Dezeen
