Have you looked around at cars lately?
That one’s Grey This one’s Black
Grey White
Grey Grey
Grey It seems like every single car on
the road is some shade of gray. And Carmakers say that, well, it's your fault.
You guys just don’t want colors anymore. But you know what? I think they’re lying.
But before I say something that gets the GM Gestapo on me,
Let's look at the facts. 68% of all cars sold last year were
black, white or gray according to Edmunds. If you add silver to that, it goes up to 77%. Over 3/4 of all cars sold are without color.
And the “bold” colors that buck the trend? Dark Blue at 7%, and Red
coming in right behind it. And look outside, the stats are absolutely true.
Every american road is an achromatic snoozefest But it wasn’t always that way.
The 1970s looked like this Vibrant hues, pastel primaries,
Blues, Greens, Yellows, Reds, Everyone and their mother had a car
that was full of pretty pigmentation, And while people liked white cars,
nobody was buying anything gray. Don’t be a bunny! That’s the color of primer!
And coming off of the swinging sixties, it made total sense.
The American people still loved bright and bold, and even though the 70s was a tough decade
for cars, people still bought em, a lot of em. Carmakers were selling an average of
10 million cars a year in the 70s, That means that there were a million green cars
sold, 1.2 million yellow cars, in a single year! You know how many yellow cars were sold in 2023?
About 31,000. The 1980s continued the color craze, but a
little less yellow and a little more brown But it was the 90s where things started
to become a little more black and white. Literally.
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The 1990s was an interesting era, The style was funky, a little weird,
a little colorful, but people weren’t afraid to let their inner goth out.
The economy was surging, and carmakers, especially Japanese ones, were
making some badass sports cars. Yellow was out, and black was the new yellow.
People who grew up watching Michael Knight and KITT boost over bad guys were now buying
sleek black on black Supras and Corvettes And the Bad Boys Porsche Turbo
certainly helped push Wall St’s favorite cars in a particular direction
It was a big shift from just 20 years ago, but not as big of a shift as this:
(news footage of Y2k market crash) The Dot-com crash
Turns out all those sleek black Porsches were getting repo’d
All that insane growth had to stop sometime, and Y2k was that time.
And although the economy wasn’t as bad as it was going to be, which we’ll talk about
later, people most certainly were feeling gray Literally Grey.
In the 2000s, out of absolutely nowhere, the majority of new
cars were sold in some shade of gray or silver. People became much more conservative,
not just with their money, but even with the way they dressed
Blacks and whites were in, and bright shades were replaced with dark blues and army greens.
And the mood of the decade could be seen with the naked eye, you just had to look at the cars.
34% of cars sold in the 2000s were silver or gray, followed by Blue at 25%, then black at 15%.
Surprisingly, green made up 13%, but that wasn’t to last.
2008. The Great Recession. While all you zoomers were
sucking your thumbs at daycare, gen-xers and millennials like myself were
wondering why our parents canceled the disneyworld trip and why dad was always at home now.
We coped with memes as best we could, but clearly, that didn’t help, because from
then on, the world of cars lost its color. In the 2010s, Blue, the de
facto king of car colors over the last 40 years, dropped from #1 to #4.
Greys and Blacks now held 32% of the market, each. Followed by white at about 17%
All colors held less than 30% of the sales, and those were mostly red and
blue, you can kiss green and yellow goodbye. Now, here we are, in the 2020s,
And well, its 50 shades of gray, but not the good kind.
Of course, at least you can still get color in your life, with merch
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who grew up watching the drift king ripping silvias down the japanese mountainside
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and by hitting subscribe of course. So then, the greyness, it was
our fault, the people’s fault. The colorful carefreeness of the 60s, 70s, and
80s was washed away by economic uncertainty, recessions, and us just being sad bois
Welllll, sort of. There could be a little more to it than that.
You see, cars back in the day were painted with something called Acrylic Enamel Paint,
It was a great way to paint in mass production. You just mix pigments, resin, and solvent,
spray it onto the car, and you’re done! A glossy, durable finish that didn’t
cost much to make, and not much to spray. It turns out however, that this “single stage”
paint was actually really really poisonous to humans, and really really bad for the ozone layer.
So carmakers moved to water based paints, and eventually multi stage systems with
clear coats, and then metallics, pearls, and whatever Voodoo Lexus was mixing
into Structural Blue on the LC500. It was a lot more advanced than the
acrylic single stage of yesteryear, which also meant it was a lot more expensive.
Especially for colorful shades, because the pigment was the most
expensive component of the paint. Now, add to that the recent supply chain
shortages which has made key chemicals for paint harder to source,
And you’ve got a recipe for higher and higher costs.
And so instead of passing that cost down to the consumer, carmakers trimmed color
options over the years to what, I assume, were the cheapest colors to make, blacks whites and greys,
aaand then they passed the cost down to the consumer too, because profit baby!
Let me give you an example, In 1983, the Toyota Corolla
was available in 14 colors. 3 of those shades were just browns! Very trendy
Today, if you rocked into a Toyota dealership, the 2024 Corolla has 8 colors.
Except, 3 of them are gray or silver. And 2 of them are white.
The only colors are dark blue and red. But that’s not even the best part, if you
walk into a Toyota showroom right now, like actually go and see what cars they have, I’ll
bet every car you see is black, white or gray. Even if you wanted a blue or red car, the chances
of you finding one at your local dealership are far less likely than something sorta gray.
And the average american who goes to a dealership listens to the salesman tell
them that “black car in front of them is the only car they’re gonna get” or “the blue
cars all capsized on a ship in the pacific”, And they believe him!
But even if they don’t buy the salesman nonsense, they’ll always
fall back on one thing: resale value. Because its a well known fact: black, white,
and grey cars are more broadly appealing, so they’ll always have better resale value
Well guess what, if you stick around til the end, I’ll tell you about how that’s a lie too.
Anyways, you, the consumer, buy the basic black car and they move on with your life. Cool.
But who made actually that decision? Did you really choose that color?
Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like the color was chosen for you.
When you go on a car brands website, they give you an interactive Builder, where you can
pick all sorts of colors and options and trims. Like being a kid in a candy store,
but hey you see that text there? Down there alllll the way there at the bottom
“Vehicle builds may vary by location, please contact your dealer”
You can build anything you want, but what you get, well that’s
whatever is in the showroom. And who decides what’s in the showroom?
Well, with most American dealerships using an allocation system, it's
the manufacturer who decides that. The dealership can put in
preferences and if they’re lucky, get one that’s spec’d close to that request
But for the most part, the manufacturer uses data to determine what sells the fastest and
for the greatest profit, and the dealer is tasked with selling those cars.
So, the manufacturer makes gray cars because they’re easy to sell
and potentially cheaper to make, gives them to the dealer who
tells us it's all we’re gonna get, we just happily accept it and move on,
because what other option do we have? And then the manufacturer sees hey we’re
making record profits on these gray blobs, so they keep making more of them.
It's a gosh dang feedback loop! The only way to break that loop would
be to walk in to the dealership and say, “no sir, I want a yellow prius, and I
won’t buy one of these 15 black ones” And ain’t nobody doing that!
We want our cars and we want them now! So we’ll suck it up and buy
one of the 7 shades of metallic gray. Section 3: The Reality of Things
Now I don’t want to seem like I’m yucking everyone’s yum, maybe you like gray!
There are definitely shades of gray and white that I like a lot, black not so much,
even though my daily driver is black. And achromatic colors are definitely
in the zeitgeist, look at technology. Sleek blacks and metallic silvers in your laptops
and phones, and look at modern homes and furniture but clearly there are some people who
like color. (hold up green google pixel) That much is obvious when you
look at cars like the C8 Corvette. The hero color on the C8 was Torch Red, and
they advertised the hell out of it. It was basically Kentucky’s Ferrari after all,
and well, in 2023 Torch Red was the most popular color for the Corvette.
Followed by White, then Black, Then another red! Then, ahem, Grey.
So a car that is typically targeted at middle-aged men rekindling their youth
bucked the no-color trend, but only barely What about brands like Porsche and BMW?
Well, for the most part they are selling their volume cars in Black or White,
but they have programs like Paint-to-Sample for Porsche and Individual for BMW.
Here you can paint your new car to whatever color your heart desires.
And its POPULAR. For the 2018-19 model year Porsche 911 GT3, the
most popular color choice was “Paint-to-Sample”! Yes, picking a custom color for your supercar
Porsche was the most common way to order the car, followed closely by silver and gray, of course.
And look at some of the amazing creations that people have come up with,
like this, or that, maybe not that, But here’s the thing,
Paint-to-Sample costs around $12,000. Yes somebody paid a used-BRZ’s-worth just
to paint their GT3 brown, bless their heart. So it begs the question, is
this class consciousness? Are loud shouty colors reserved
only for those with money? Does the middle class, with our ever tightening
pocketbooks and constant economic uncertainty, have to stay muted because
to shout is to stand out. And as the proverb goes, “Deru kugi-wa, utareru”
The nail that sticks out, gets hammered down. Maybe regular people don’t want to show up to the
office and be “the person with the yellow car” Maybe, it's not something I could say
for sure. Of course, you can tell me in the comments how you feel about that.
But with modern fashion now calling back to the funky colorfulness of the
90s, it's surprising to me that cars continue to get greyer as time goes on.
Maybe it is because we’re all broke or struggling, and remember “Black, white,
and gray have the best resale value”! Right?
Wrong. iSeeCars did a study of 1.6
million cars from 2020 to 2023, And it turns out that Colorful cars command
the highest prices in the used market. Yellow has the lowest average 3 year
depreciation, followed by Beige and Orange. Guess who’s down at the bottom?
Blacks, Greys, and Whites, at different levels depending on the type of vehicle.
Yes, it turns out you totally should have bought that Metallic Brown Camry, because you could
have made 3-4 grand more when you sold it. Now, the reason might be
largely supply and demand. There aren’t exactly very many brown
cars out there, so sellers have greater control of the market,
But the point still stands! that black Corolla we bought in our earlier
example, well we got absolutely hosed on it, with nearly 24% depreciation on average.
But we were settling on black just for resale value??
And who perpetuated the resale myth? Well, it was the car dealers of course.
The very same car dealers who are buying your now-extra-depreciated black
Corolla after a few years for pennies, and then sticking your negative equity into the
new shiny gray blob for you to wheel around town. It's a scam! One that you’ve willingly
taken part in by convincing yourself that you love colors that aren’t colorful.
And the worst part is, with the data-driven allocation system that every carmaker is
using, it probably isn’t changing anytime soon. Now, I don’t want to be all doom and gloom,
There is a silver lining to all this. Modern automotive paint and the
engineers that develop them are awesome. Grey once was limited to basic silver
and primer, but now we have Acura Gotham Gray, and Audi Nardo Gray, and Porsche
Seal Gray, and Toyota CU Later Gray Plus don’t even get me started
on the pearl whites, sheesh What was once one dimensional
has now truly become 50 shades But, for a dumb little 90s kid like me,
who grew up watching streetfire.net videos of Royal Sapphire Pearl Supras,
and Competition Yellow Mica RX-7s I can’t help but feel sad, that aside from
a few brightly colored monster trucks, and the odd impossible-to-purchase sports car,
The cars that you and I, the every person, will be driving, will probably
be gray for many years to come. Thanks for watching.
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I’ll see you in the next one
