With its Surface-Coated Brakes, Porsche is claiming a major advance: extended life, no fade, and even better, no rust and no brake dust.

With the debut of the 2019 Cayenne SUV a short while back, Porsche announced what it described as a major breakthrough in production car brake technology: Porsche Surface-Coated Brakes, or PSCB for short. Using a specialized spraying process, an extremely hard, thin layer of tungsten carbide is deposited on the friction surfaces of the brake rotor (brake disc, for you British readers). When matched with a specially developed brake pad material, the resulting friction mechanism offers longer brake life, reduced fade, and most interesting of all for many car enthusiasts, no more rusty rotors and no more messy brake dust. To show off the new process, Porsche has confidently finished the brake calipers in white.

To explain how PSCB works, we’ve got one of our favorite go-to sources on technical issues, Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained, to break it all down for us. A few interesting bits of trivia: Tungsten carbide is around twice as dense as steel, and in the Porsche process, the rotor coating is around 100 microns deep—around the thickness of a sheet of notebook paper or a human hair. As a result, Porsche’s surface-coated rotors cannot be refinished, but their life is 30 percent longer than conventional components. Here’s the whole story in the video below.