Asymptotically, electrostatics does have a role to play as it ultimately becomes repulsive, although it does so beyond 4 Å in the sliding coordinate (Fig. ). Beyond that, charge penetration effects cease to be important and E elst assumes its leading-order multipolar form, which is quadrupolar repulsion. This compensates for the second local minimum in E vdW that can be observed beyond 4 Å in the sliding coordinate, which does not exist in E int , and its presence in E vdW is an artifact of the fact that exchange-repulsion decays faster than dispersion. This suggests that E vdW provides a meaningful explanation for short-range conformational preferences of benzene dimer but should not be used for asymptotic analysis.