I’ve never been one for hi-vis. It is not merely vanity, though I admit luminous yellow is just not my colour. It’s that too many cyclists see it as a panacea, a fluorescent force-field that will protect them from the dangers of the road, whereas the truth is you can be done up head-to-toe as a highlighter pen and it’ll not help you at all if you’re always cowering in a driver’s blind spot.
I don’t wear “proper” cycling gear to ride two miles to the Guardian’s Manchester office each day. If it’s raining, I’ll don a waterproof jacket (or, more honestly, take the car). But generally I’m in my civvies and so am arguably the prime market for Volvo’s new LifePaint, a “water-based reflective safety spray”, which promises to turn ordinary clothes into beacons when in direct glare of headlights.
The problem is, my winter coat is easily the most expensive garment I own. I was not at all keen on spraying it with some hokey paint, however allegedly invisible by daylight. So I chose an old grey bike jacket and used a whole can to douse it, front and back.
I took a picture with my phone and the fabric glistened like silver fireflies, but when I went out in the dark I could see no discernible effect when in the glare of car headlights.
The publicity photos make LifePaint look amazing. The models’ jackets are painted with bold block stripes which glow gloriously in the gloom. Under my photographer’s flash, my jacket looked as if it had been in a fight with a tin of talcum powder, the spray job as patchy as vitiligo, even when I used a second can on it. A bit of it somehow leaked on to my dress, giving it a grubby mildew effect, which thankfully did come out in the wash.
It has sparked perhaps predictable outrage among some cyclists. Mikael Colville-Andersen, CEO of Copenhagenize Design Co, accuses Volvo of “classic smokescreening from the automobile industry”, judging that it switches responsibility from motorists to cyclists adding: “LifePaint is simply a way to shift the focus from a failed product that is under fire and place it on the vulnerable traffic users. Pure victim blaming.”
My primary issue is that it’s a publicity stunt designed for Instagram rather than roads. If it doesn’t really show up in car headlights, it doesn’t work. And to suggest it does – and can somehow prevent the 19,000 bicycle accidents the publicity material suggests happen in the UK each year – is not only rather misleading but also irresponsible.
