Picarro measures gases at concentrations far below anything a person could sense, which is a hard thing to put in somebody’s hands. What it handed over instead was a car, which happens to be where its own instruments do their work.

Picarro builds instruments that measure gases at concentrations far below anything a person could sense: methane leaking from a gas network, ethylene oxide at a plant's fence line, contamination in a semiconductor cleanroom. Its best-known product does that work from a moving car, driving ordinary streets and mapping what is escaping underneath them. Almost none of that can be handed to anybody. An analyser is a quiet grey box that measures something invisible, and the better it works the less there is to look at. A company like that has an unusual problem for a technical business: everything it is proud of is a number.

So the object became a stock car, in the company's own green with a black bonnet and roof, small enough to stand on a monitor arm and quick enough to finish in a sitting. Printed surfaces are the entire budget for identity on a model that size, so they went where a name is read: the mark on the bonnet and PICARRO along each flank. Everything else had to come out of the shape of the car.