If you put something over it, it loses it’s reflective properties. Something is only as reflective as it’s upper most layer. Unless you use something transparent, but even things we would commonly think of as transparent usually are only transparent at specific wavelength. And even then it’s probably not really transparent, more like translucent. Not to mention things like internal reflections and wavelength lengthening.

This is a super complex subject with many people all over the world working on it and lots of money being put into it. It likely everything people can think of has been thought of and we need some real effort to get to a workable solution. Since no commercial application has been found, it’s not certain this is a fixable problem.

Too often we see innovative ideas and they are marketed as this is just the first version. We can work out the kinks, extrapolate and get to something real special. In reality this is often not the case, actual limitations apply and not all problems are fixable.

Those are slick from the added glass powder for reflectivity.

Who’s putting Teflon on road stripes…?