When’s the last time you saw a car other than red, black, blue, gray, or white on the road?
Like, what happened to all the pinks, purples, oranges, yellows, and greens I remember from the 90s?
My theory of because of the rental fleet to used car lots flow. Rental fleets will buy newer cars, then sell them back to the dealerships so they can sell them as used cars. It’s much easier to sell generic coloured cars, than highlighter piss yellow
Mine is purple :)
I see a Tuscadero (Metallic Pink) Jeep Wrangler about every other day on my way home from work. Always puts a Smile in my face.
I was just talking about the number of cars that seem to be garden utensil green / brown these days.
My car is green and my partners car is lava orange 🤘
My partner and I drive a bright green Chevy Bolt EV (“Shock” is the official name of the color) and we love the smiles we sometimes get.
Most car dealerships only stock black, white, silver or grey.
I walked into our showroom the other day and it was very reminiscent of Henry Fords “any colour, as long as it’s black”. There were also two silver cars and one dark blue car hidden in the back, as if it was ashamed of itself.
I drive a tan car. My niece drives a mint green car. There are two jungle green Zeekr’s in our street but every single other car is monochrome.
I saw yellow today, and I see them often enough to make a little game out of it.
Today: yellow, turquoise, green, all in a carpark near my house.
I’m from the UK and recently was in Toronto so rented a car to get around and also to drive to Montreal. We will observed that all the cars were very limited in colours. Is it a North American thing?
In the UK, it has been getting less diverse but still a fair bit of variety
Same experience here. White cars are increasingly common as apparently they have the highest resale value. Quite boring.
Today, because my car is green 😝
I actually hate the attention it gets, but I’m poor and it was cheap. Never seems like a good idea to me if other drivers can easily remember you. On the other hand, I can always find it in a big parking lot.
I saw a green one the other day too
Yellow is far more common than red, I see green occasionally
Two days ago. It was a gross dehydrated piss yellow pickup truck
It’s funny, because I just made a comment about this in another thread.
There the OP was asking if people today are less ‘vibrant’ than they were a few years ago.
Not only are cars getting duller, the streets are losing vibrancy.
The best street performers of the past are now online. You used to happen upon a great comic or musician at random, playing in a park or mall.
Vibrant pigments usually rely on heavy metals. Lead was common in Red and green paints, arsenic was in greens and chromium was in blue. When they were replaced with organic pigments. They either lost their vibrancy or degraded and faded very quickly.
Also, paint is spread very thinly on cars compared to in the old days. This is partially due to higher quality steel, partially due to more plastic panels and mainly due to weight and cost reduction. This means that doing a cut-and-polish to liven up faded paintwork is liable to expose undercoat.
One economic reason I heard is that bright colors make used cars harder to sell.
It’s better to play it safe with a neutral color than risk being stuck with a bright yellow or pink car no one else thinks is pretty.
My niece just traded her burgundy Alfa Romeo Giulietta for her brand new Geely EX2.
She did want the dusty pink one (she is a 19 year old girl who works very hard and purchased her cars herself), but decided on the mint green one because it would have better resale value. They also have a tan one, but the boring grey one is the hottest seller!
Saturday, the last time I took my car out on the road. However, the point is taken, we specifically wanted one of the nicer colors for our car. The dealer was a bit unhappy with us, as we walked into the dealership and said, “we want this vehicle, at this trim level,. in this color.” Ultimately, we got the car we wanted at one trim level higher, in the color we wanted. We were already paying ~$60k for the vehicle, the extra $2k to go up a trim level was a small enough jump that we decided to take the car, rather than wait longer for special order. And, if I’m fully honest, I’m actually glad we got the higher trim level. Some of the extra features were very nice to have.
Had we wanted white, we could have driven off the lot with a vehicle the same day. But ya, fuck dull colors. Sure, I recall reading that the dull colors have better resell value, but that’s not something I worry about. We use a car as a tool, not an investment. We’ve already paid the car off and we plan to drive it into the ground. And I’d much rather have the car I want to drive, rather than min/max a couple thousand out of it at some far distant date, maybe.
