Q: I saw a car completely covered in a chrome wrap. It was a sunny day and it created a lot of glare, which could temporarily blind other drivers. Is that legal?
A: I feel a lot more confident answering questions when I can quote a law to show that something is illegal. It’s trickier to confirm that something is legal, because maybe I missed something in the law. It’s hard to prove a law doesn’t exist when there are so many of them to look through.
With that disclaimer, I searched through Washington’s vehicle equipment laws and came up empty-handed. My confidence was shaken by numerous online articles claiming that many states have laws limiting the reflectivity levels of a vehicle but, in the end, I could find no such evidence.
Actually, that’s not completely true. Washington does have a law that prohibits using window tint with a mirror finish. That law was passed in 1989, long before vehicle wraps were a thing, but just because reflective window tint is illegal doesn’t mean highly reflective car bodies are (or should be).
If we did decide to make super-shiny cars illegal we’d run into another problem. What would we do about all the polished tanker trucks? That gleam isn’t just aesthetic; it serves an important function. The shiny surface helps to regulate the temperature of the tank’s contents by reflecting the sun’s radiation. If you’ve got a tank full of milk, you don’t want the sun spoiling it before you make your delivery.
Now, if you really want to do some legal gymnastics, there is one law that you might try to fit to this situation, but I think you’d be stretching to the point of failure. The law prohibits driving a vehicle that “is in such unsafe condition as to endanger any person.” You might argue that a chrome wrap creates an unsafe condition, but then you’d have to make that same argument for polished tanker trucks, and we’ve been legally okay with those for decades.
Even though I can’t find a law prohibiting chrome vehicle wraps, it doesn’t necessarily make it a great idea. Wrapping a vehicle is about style, not function. Sure, the wrap protects the paint underneath, but the color and finish you chose is a decision based on taste, or sometimes a lack thereof. I know taste is subjective, but if you cover your luxury vehicle with designer handbag logos (people do it), I’m confident that a democratic vote on your taste would not go your way. Given that your color options are near limitless, you could choose one that’s not prone to annoying your fellow drivers.
Giving your car a chrome wrap is fairly benign compared to some other vehicle modifications, like lifting a vehicle enough to increase the likelihood of a rollover or making changes to the suspension or tires that affect the vehicle handling; those actually increase the risk of a crash. As a side note, according to insurance industry sources, modifying a vehicle so that it changes your risk factor for a crash, and not telling your insurance company, could result in them not paying to replace your totaled vehicle, particularly if that modification was a factor in the crash.
Americans spend around 50 billion dollars a year to personalize our cars, so the odds are good that some of you reading this are thinking of customizing something on your car. Since driving is already the riskiest thing most of us do in a normal day, whatever modifications you make, choose ones that won’t increase your risk of a crash.
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