Who could use some good news? I feel like we all could right about now. And this is the kind of good news that I feel many of us will see as something that has been a long time coming, a final breaking of an idiotic tyranny, one that nobody ever asked for or wanted, but we endured for years. I’m talking about a dark, sinister menace that has been stalking the automotive world for about a decade now. A greedy, cruel material that has taken the interiors of cars hostage for far too long. I’m talking about Piano Black, and I’m happy to say that it appears its reign of terror is finally ending.
Are you familiar with Piano Black? Fundamentally, it’s just a plastic. A very glossy, shiny plastic, I suppose named for the extremely glossy black laquerwork found on the grand pianos that you likely see multiple times a day.
You know, one of these:
Look, it even has three pedals, just like our favorite cars! I always forget that pianos have clutches.
I’m not really sure exactly who decided that that sort of deep-glossy look was what was needed for car interiors, but whoever it was must not have had fingers or maybe they lived in a hermetically-sealed chamber, free of all dust, tiny particles of dried skin, anything that can cause tiny scratches, or, really anything that exists in reality, because Piano Black and normal human reality simply do not mix.
Piano Black is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare because it’s an inherently unforgiving material, and when it comes to cars, I can’t really think of any worse qualities than unforgiveness, especially in an interior material.
And yet, somehow, it was showing up everywhere. Even the Mitsubishi Mirage had it!
Piano Black is terrible stuff. It’s not just me saying this; the global consensus seems to be that nobody likes Piano Black! While it may look great in brochure pictures and carefully-staged photo shoots, when it comes to it actually in a real car that gets driven, it gets covered in fingerprints, micro-scratches and macro-scratches, it gets cloudy and dull and just looks awful. And because car owners know what it’s supposed to look like, because they have a vision of the platonic ideal of Piano Black in their heads, the disparity between what they know it’s supposed to look like and how it actually looks is driving people nuts.
This material is so demanding of constant upkeep and maintenance, it becomes a miserable burden for people. And because it’s often all over dashboards and around controls that require actually touching, it’s always visible and always being smudged or scratched or whatever.
Look at all of these videos dedicated to the fruitless pursuit of trying to keep Piano Black interior panels looking like they hypothetically are supposed to:
There’s more, there’s so many more videos like this, because Piano Black is about as durable and scratch-resistant as an extremely thin slice of Nova Scotia salmon, but without the charm.
Your car’s interior should be able to take some use and abuse; it’s going to be touched and prodded and things will fall on it and things may be spilled and your fingernails will rake over it, and a good interior material should shrug all this off with the cool, cavalier aplomb of an astronaut drinking a cocktail. But not Piano Black; Piano Black is a fussy little purebred dog that vomits if you walk past it too fast, and its hair and teeth fall out if it drinks water that’s too tepid.
Fuck Piano Black.
Thankfully, carmakers seem to be finally realizing this, as Piano Black seems to be finally disappearing from new car dashboards. In fact, at least one major automaker seems to be addressing this directly: Kia. In fact, last year Kia’s head of design, Jochen Paesen, announced that they would be eliminating the high-gloss material in the upcoming EV9, and at this year’s LA Auto Show, which is currently happening, Kia’s reveal had much the same to say:
If you jump to 5:12, you can hear them say the center stack “swaps the previous high-gloss surfaces for a sophisticated texture,” which is a clear reference to Piano Black interior material. They also mention better resistance to fingerprints, another dig at the glossy garbage.
I can’t speak to why Piano Black had such a cruel and persistent grip on our car interiors for so long. I don’t understand how automakers could have seen how poorly the material ages from normal use and still decided to keep offering it. It feels like a willful disregard for how cars are actually, normally used.
But now, finally, I think the Piano Black empire is crumbling. That doesn’t help those of you still saddled with this miserable, uncooperative, cruel plastic, but at least we can hope that future generations will be free from keeping microfiber cloths in their car, fecklessly and uselessly wiping at fingerprints that are doomed to re-appear moments later.
See you in hell, Piano Black.
Piano photo via Yamaha
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Fortunately I can’t afford cars with piano black.
Unfortunately cars in my budget fall squarely in the ‘soft touch plastics’ era. And of course right now all those plastics are going beyond soft, and heading straight for ‘melted’.
Oh well, at least it keeps the cars cheap.
Hopefully black wheels are next. I’m blown away they’re still popular. I mean, the chrome wheel craze only lasted 2 years.
I don’t know why this was ever spec’ed on any US product. I went to a EV demo day and was really put off by how many of even the expensive luxury brands used such a bad design element.
Funniest one to me is Subaru’s usage. They seem to forget their owners (and their marketing team) looooooooove dogs. You know what doesn’t love dogs? Piano black. All dog hair. All the time.
I have to shamefully admit that I actually added piano black to an interior that previously had none.
My S13 had some buttons by the steering wheel. The paint was wearing off so I removed the gray paint and polished the black plastic beneath. It wasn’t a large flat surface so maintaining it wasn’t so bad.
I was much younger then and had no idea my project would open a portal.
Piano black trim is like alcantara… not sure how this trend emerged, but can’t wait to see it go.
Good riddance that this is going. My car and truck are both too old for this, so they have color-matched plastic of varying quality. My sister’s ’23 Impreza does have piano black so I’ll probably be looking into either plastidip or vinyl to cover the easily scratched crap infesting the interior.
No more piano black to polish up. Fine. So what do you use to clean the fingerprints off the massive touchscreens that have replaced it? (Real question.)
The only thing I dislike about my Mk 7 GTI is all that damn piano black. Good riddance.
I can’t stand the stuff. I’m sure Bentley likely had some piano black prior to the year 2000, but the first time I remember seeing it go mainstream was as an option on the third generation Range Rovers. At the time it was actual lacquered wood and not cheap plastic.. it was also mostly limited to low touch areas of the Range Rover’s interior. After that, everyone else saw the material as a prestige item and slathered the cheap plastic stuff everywhere.
Now that piano black is on the way out, can we talk about the fake stitching on vinyl dashes.. I’m looking at you modern Toyota.
If there’s one thing I think piano black illustrates it’s that the auto industry doesn’t actually know what customers want, or if they do they’re doing a shitty job at implementing solutions for it.
Please bring back cloth seats. Wool is perfect. Light matte wood trim if you need some wood. Volvo and Range Rover I believe have options for both.
“a good interior material should shrug all this off with the cool, cavalier aplomb of an astronaut drinking a cocktail. But not Piano Black; Piano Black is a fussy little purebred dog that vomits if you walk past it too fast, and its hair and teeth fall out if it drinks water that’s too tepid.”
This is the pure gold turning of a phrase I crave, and that I’ve come to expect from Jason. Thank You!
Full wheezy laugh from me when I read this.
Former piano rebuilder here. That Yamaha pictured doesn’t have a lacquer finish—none of them do. And that polyester finish must have been invented at the behest of Satan. When fixing even a minor scratch or chip, the labor clocked in at 4-8 hours.
The kit sold has 6 grades of sanding cloth from 1200 to 6000 grit. Then polishing. Do not recommend if you’re not getting paid
I found out the hard way how hard a piano black finish is to replicate when I built my first guitar, I may have shaved 5 years off my life from the stress of trying to get it polished properly.
Ouch. I definitely sympathize. I at least had the luxury of practicing on a warranteed leg—and the great majority of repairs were to legs where a 10-footer repair was acceptable: doing it on your own guitar must have been miserable indeed.
It took 2 attempts and I was frustrated enough with it that I never really picked it up after finishing, ended up trading it to my buddy for a table saw. The next 2 were far easier since I didn’t use black again.
I have a theory: piano black is really quick and easy to mock up in a styling buck compared to any kind of texture. I think this is interior design laziness at the design studio.
As soon as it’s in the real world the distracting reflections make it awful even before it’s been touched, but by that point the tooling has been paid for.
The previous owner of my old Z4 Coupe was so proud of finding one with piano black trim.
It’s horrible. It’s cheap plastic that looks like cheap plastic.
I loved everything about the look of that car except that trim.