Battenburg markings were originally developed in the mid-1990s in the UK by the Police Scientific Development Branch (PSDB) (now the Home Office Centre for Applied Science and Technology (CAST)) at the request of the national motorway policing sub-committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers.
The brief was to create a livery for motorway and trunk road police vehicles which would maximise the visibility of the vehicles when stopped on scene, both in daylight, and under headlights from a minimum distance of , and which would distinctively mark them as police vehicles [REF].