A common complaint in today's automotive
press and often among buyers is that all cars these days
kind of look the same. The push for aerodynamic designs
to meet fuel efficiency standards, the need to abide by
increasingly stringent safety regulations, and just the ever growing popularity of
the family crossover are all reasons given as to why the shapes
of cars seem harder and harder to tell apart. But another area where
there is a great deal of similarity in today's automotive fleet is
in color to the point where some auto enthusiasts complain
car colors are boring. There actually is something
to this argument. There are a few colors that are
extremely popular, both in the United States and around the world, and
they are, well, not terribly colorful. We found in our latest
report, which analyzed the old two thousand nineteen year, all the different
regions as well as North America. We found that the color
white is still the dominant color. It's very popular in every
region, most popular in the Asia-Pacific region, but also
trending very strongly in Europe, Middle East, Africa, South America,
as well as North America. What happened to the pink Cadillacs,
the bright red, green and yellow muscle cars, the racing stripes, they
are still out there on sports cars, halo vehicles
and limited editions. But they are vastly outnumbered
by sober conservative whites, blacks, silvers and grays. So why are these a chromatic colors
or colors that lack color so popular? It has to do
with practicality, human psychology and technology. And people in the car
coatings business say car colors are not really that boring at all. Coatings have become ever more
sophisticated and coatings makers can do a lot more with less within
just one color type, such as white, for example, companies can now achieve
a great range of shades and effects not possible before and which
you might not at first notice. Looking around the world, it is hard
not to notice that a few car colors do seem to
dominate the color. White, for example, is painted on
39 percent of cars around the world, then black with gray and
silver, following behind the most popular non neutral color, i.e. one that isn't simply white, black or
some shade of gray or silver is blue. So why what is it about
these colors that makes them so popular? Why isn't there a
greater degree of variation? Part of it, say
industry analysts, is practicality. First, all of those colors white,
black, gray and silver are available in pretty much every segment
of vehicle, as people say, of clothing. Those colors go with anything,
no matter the shape or size of the vehicle. They work well and
they don't go out of style. That matters because
cars are expensive. This might be the era of
fast fashion where consumers can update their wardrobes every few months
as colors and designs change. But the average new vehicle in
the United States is somewhere around 35000 dollars, and cars are among
the biggest single expenses a person is likely to
make in their lifetime. Even if someone leases a vehicle, they
are liable to hold on to it for at least three years. Cars also take a long time to
develop and bring to market automotive colors. In general, when you compare
them to other industries, they tend to be on
the conservative side. It's because the turnaround time or
engineering a color position is three to five years as opposed to
18 months or 24 months in many other industries. And we also have
to go through a lot of sophisticated engineering to dial
in the color position. And once inside the car, people tend
to keep the car for a longer period of time. Another reason industry analysts cite
could be resale value. Customers might be less inclined to buy
a bold or eccentric color for a car they might want to get
rid of in a few years. That eggplant colored sports car might
appeal to too narrow a buyer base and affect the asking price. The availability of neutral colors such
as white, black, gray or silver can also make a big
difference, especially in a country like America, where customers are used to
going to an auto dealership and driving a new car home
on the same day. It is a bit of a chicken
and egg problem, dealers might be less likely to stock bright greens, oranges
or purples because those are statistically less likely to sell, which
makes cars in those colors less immediately available for customers that
want them and so on. Having said that, car coatings companies
are quick to point out that they will make a car in
any color an automaker wants. And car manufacturers do sometimes offer
a wide range of colors for vehicles, especially certain kinds. There are limited edition colors which
are often featured on Halo vehicles or more
specialty vehicles. Ford comes out with limited edition
colors on the Mustang, for example, Toyota offers a limited edition
color for every model year on the Tacoma to red pickup truck
vehicles such as the new Ford Bronco, the Chevrolet Colorado 02, the
BMW M Series, sports sedans and many others all come with
signature colors that are often bold and unique. But many of these are
low volume vehicles that appeal to specific types of customers and can
sometimes carry higher price tags than an automaker's
more popular products. There are also some psychological
reasons why people drift toward neutral colors when choosing colors for
cars or trying to understand their popularity color designers
look around the world. What are the colors on the other
objects in the home or the workplace? What do people associate
with certain types of items? As we look at what's happening in
pop culture, what we see in installations and art museums,
we read a lot. We we read not only things that
are directly related to color, but we also read more abstract things,
because color being a very psychological and a very emotional thing,
we have to really connect with what people as individuals
are looking for, what they're connecting with, what societies are
connecting with, and how technology from other areas, from
other aspects is actually delivering to that. This is affected car color choice. A big factor in recent years
is the rise of electronics. The reason why whites and the chromatics
are so popular with the car is they seem to work
very, very well in terms of the way it's
appropriate for the car. And by that I mean a
car is very high technology. And if you think about technology
in other industries, for example, you tend to see a lot of
Silber's or a lot of grays. And recently, with the
popularity of certain technology firms and the color white,
the color white was also viewed as a technology. Colors, colors can
evoke certain feelings about an object and in a way
need to reflect its features. This is very evident in the case
of an emerging class of vehicles, electric cars. There are colors that are
especially popular among EVs, especially white and blue. The popularity of
blue for EVs is quite notable, given the fact that it is a
chromatic color, not a neutral one. Blue seems to be
a very popular color. A lot of people like it. And for the automotive market, you can
do a slight silver, a very chromatic blue, a very
dark navy blue. And all of those ranges would
be very appropriate for different vehicle styles. And I think with the market, when
they first started to come out into the marketplace, a few of the OEMs
offered a specific light blue and those vehicles. And I think that
equated with consumers and and blue being associated with
electric vehicles. The popularity of a few neutral
car color choices obscures some important history about how far car
coatings have come and how much choice there is
available to customers. Today, in the early days of
the automotive industry, the palette of available colors was pretty limited
and paints were fragile. The pioneering Henry Ford,
who brought industrialized manufacturing techniques to the fledgling car business,
is reputed to have said that a customer could have Ford's Model T
in any color as long as it was black. The story
is only partly true. The Model T was available in several
colors for at least part of its lifetime, though for several years the
car could in fact only be bought in black. This was because black paint dried
the fastest and was therefore best suited for the rapid automotive production
methods Ford was trying to implement to meet burgeoning demand
as the automotive industry grew. However, Cotting technologies became
more sophisticated and that expanded the range of
colors carmakers could offer. New primers helped protect against rust,
new top coat resins kept colors from fading and added shine. So in the 80s, clear coats
started to become available in the automotive industry and also a
process called electric coating, which means the whole vehicle would get
coated with a primer surface that would create
a protective layer. And then on top of that, we put
paint and then a clear coat effect. Coatings made from metal, glass and
minerals such as maika could give paint jobs a kind of sparkle. Paint technology is improved to the
point where you can take metallic flake pigments, which tend to be kind
of large, and we can get those metallic flake pigments to align very
much in a parallel fashion. Paint on the car body is about
half the width of a human hair. It's not a lot of
space to work with. And if we can get a good
Perello orientation of these metal flakes, what designers found is that they
can introduce not only color direction but also texture
into a coating. Techniques like these allowed paint
makers to widen the possible palette of colors
and effects achievable. So once there really might have only
been at most a few varieties of any given color. But now, for example, the white
that might have dominated in the middle of the 20th century, say
a bleached hospital white seen on emergency or service vehicles, is
no longer the only choice. Now there is a mind
boggling range of possibilities. You can add a little bit of blue
to make a white look cooler, which is popular for cars trying to
achieve a futuristic or high tech effect. You can have a yellower
or creamier white that evokes luxury using coatings, flakes and
subtle shifts in hue. A wide range of possibilities is
achieved, but each OEM has a different version of white, a different
version of of those neutral colors that supports
their brand strategy. They're very specific about what
those colors look like. And I know I have friends of
mine and they're just like, Oh, isn't gray gray? And it's like not look
at this gray versus this gray. This has a blue kassis, has a
brown cast, has a high sparkle. This has a silky sparkle. Colors do come into fashion and
then lose popularity in cars over time. Green was a popular color
in the 1990s, accounting for somewhere around 15 or 16
percent of all cars. But now the number of green cars
is more in the single digits, according to BASF research. But Jane Harrington of PBG said she
has been seeing green on an increasing number of SUVs and the
color is another one that is associated with nature, biology and
eco friendliness, suggesting it could come back into fashion. Companies are also looking to the future,
both PGE and BASF told CNBC they are developing car coatings that
can easily be noticed by technology used on
autonomous vehicles. That part of the market has a
way to go before it becomes widely adopted, but it is already
something researchers are thinking about. A development like that could
completely change the market. Once again, the car colors on the
road in 50 years could be completely different from the
ones we see today.
Interesting video. I have a black car and I honestly hate it. I would love it if green cars do make a comeback. Dark green is by far my favorite color. If Toyota started offering their cars in Spruce Green Mica again I would get so excited. Even a Camry is exciting looking in Spruce Green Mica.
Somebody gimme a rundown
Don't forget how the rise of leasing has impacted car colors.
Some brands today are up to 70%+ leased. When a car is leased, the automaker has to worry about not just selling it once, but twice. Imagine if you custom ordered a purple car with red interior. At the end of your lease, when you throw the keys back, how are they ever going to find the next buyer for it? And it is unreasonable for the automaker to calculate a different residual value for every possible color and trim combination.
mfw they show footage of a body-on-frame SUV when they talk about crossovers
Overall, pretty interesting video. While I do like white, black, and grey, I'd be down for a green comeback.
Didn't donut media do this awhile ago
Slight irony in that the thumbnail shows silver Model 3 which is a discontinued color, making it fairly special on that car.
In hot countries like Saudi Arabia most cars are white because it reflects the sun the most.
The answer is that people are boring as fuck.
I only really want blue so I don't care what is en vouge. Blue it is. I'm happy every time I drive that my car is not black, white or gray like 90% of the cars around here. Props to everyone who puts some color into the whole picture be it yellow, bright red, green, thank you for making the street a less boring view.