SWEET WAMPUM LOOK AT THOSE FOLDS

Yeah. The lab I work at has a BYK-mac colorimeter and a glossmeter. They're made specifically with measuring car paint coatings in mind, and have built in standard parameters that different car manufacturers use.

Other people have also mentioned it, but it uses the same Lab CIE units to assign different shades and colors a number series. Also, since if you look at a car from different angles, at different times of the day, or in different parts of the world, the color, gloss, and spackle could all look different. So the instruments use an illumination source that attempts to mimic the sunlight for different situations and there are simply agreed upon standards to the measurement angles and the light source parameters.

When I first learned of it I was thinking the same as you, that color is completely subjective based on the person's eyes, but I figured well, everyone will look at a tree and say the leaves are green and in the fall they turn bright red, so we must have similar enough sight that we can come to some agreement on how "green" or "red" something is.