Somebody posted this on the other site, thought I’d link to
The age of average by Alex Murrell https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
You must log in or register to comment.
My car’s battery is expected to last usefully ~20 years. Its paint won’t. Right now it’s dark blue. Some time in the future, maybe yellow.
Resale value. Silver/graphite retains the highest resale value, which is why you see so many of them. It’s boring and awful. My car is orange because it makes me smile and I can easily find it in a parking lot.
On top of this, a lot of cars come into circulation through vehicle hire and corporate fleets. They get driven for a year, then sold on the used market.
Vehicle hire companies also all want specifically white/silver/grey cars for the same reason - they are inoffensive and unobtrusive to the people renting them, and they sell better afterwards too.
My orange Veloster was a corporate fleet car, though I get the point. It’s also a turbo and a manual, so they might’ve added it to the fleet particularly for the people that like a bit of fun.
You sure about that? I bought my Volvo impulsively in part because it was the fully equipped model in blue instead of any other color which was readily available…
It seems we’re cut from the same cloth. Unfortunately, the majority of people are boring.
https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/what-are-the-best-car-colors-to-buy/
I can also say, coming from a place that gets snow in the winter, I can see why white cars have an edge over others, which is that they’re better at hiding salt. They put salt on all the roads to melt snow and ice, but then it sticks to cars and shows up very noticeably on anything with darker/bolder colors.
Just to build on that a bit, I think it’s more so that resale value is considered higher because more people today aren’t trying to be as colorful as previous decades.
You see it in clothing, too, which people aren’t buying with the intention to resell. 1980’s clothing was a lot more colorful and flashy. In winter, everyone had those colorful windbreakers and ski jackets. Today, when I go out during winter and look at what kinds of coats people on the street are wearing, it’s basically just a sea of mostly black and beige in various styles.
To take it further - cities and towns. Most cities have a fairly dull color palette (browns and greys). There are of course exceptions to this but most people live in very bland, non-offensive environments from cars, to clothing, to the houses and office buildings where they live and work.
I’ve always wondered why humans both love color and are scared of it at the same time?
Looking at video games right now, which is one of the largest cultural touchstones of this age, I think that’s going to change soon. Right now, there are so many games using vibrant colors. Two examples that come to mind are The Finals and the upcoming Marathon.
This style is different than the past though. It isn’t color everywhere. It’s mostly white (or other neutral color) with very vibrant accents. It’s the style Mirror’s Edge (many of the devs now work on The Finals) did so long ago, but it didn’t stick. Now it looks like it’s going to stick around for a little while at least.
A Washington Post color analysis of D.C. found shades of gray permeate neighborhoods where the White population has increased and the Black population has decreased.
Obviously. White + black = gray.
(/s because I’m sure someone needs that for this.)
Oh, for sure. Trying to find my black coat on the coatrack at work is always a pain. I miss the fun colors of the 80s. Still a huge fan of that teal.
I had a bright orange Polo a while back. I loved the colour and the nicest thing about it is you can easily locate it in a car park.
We got rid of lead paint.
Because it was and is cheaper than using bright colors.
It is not a choice of the consumers.
It is a choice of consumers. If it is cheaper to make boring colors, and consumers actually care enough about color to pay extra for it, then manufacturers would sell more brightly colored cars.
But they don’t. A car buyer goes to the lot and says “I want a car like x, y, z, and I want it to be bright red!” The dealer doesn’t have red, because most people don’t want red, so they say “okay, we can have that car for you in two months. Or you can drive off the lot today in this black car for $X less.” The buyer realizes they don’t actually care that much, and buys the black car.
The buyer can always then go to a paint shop and change the color. But they probably won’t do this either, since, again, they don’t care that much. Sure, they’d like a red car - but then they’d be without it for a few days while the painting was done and it would cost a bunch of money.
Article goes into the broader behavioral picture, but the reason dealers stock mostly black, white and gray cars is that in practice more customers who come in looking for a specific color will settle for black, white or gray if they get a “good deal”, but will walk away from more distinct colors.
I specifically bought black to not be noticed and it’s not a sparkly color that is expensive to have touched up.
I also chose black, but only because the choice was black, white or grey. White looks cheap and shows dirt fast, and grey makes you almost invisible in the wet and overcast UK weather.
Black cars show dirt, dust and mud the most
Also not a great choice for the Aussie sun. Absorbs heat. “An experiment by the Royal Automobile Association of South Australia (RAA) found that on a 43-degree day, the interior of a black car reached 83°C in just 20 minutes, while a white car reached 71°C in the same time.” Either can kill you quickly at those temps, of course, but dark colours will always be hotter than lighter colours, and in Australia, most places, for most of the year, are pretty warm, hot, or a couple of degrees cooler than hell.
Black cars…Also not a great choice for the Aussie sun. Absorbs heat.
I remember watching a televised oval-track truck race a few decades ago; one competitor had to drop out because his truck developed vapour lock from the heat. The bonnet was black.
In the next race his truck had a white bonnet. A pit reporter with a pyrometer took temps of that truck’s bonnet before the race, plus another truck with a black bonnet.
The white bonnet was 42C and the black bonnet was 82C – just sitting there in the starting lineup, with engines off.
Marketers were trying to capture the normally anti-consumerist young hippy market by appealing to their value of self-expression.
If I ever buy a car, you can guarantee I’m getting it a dark purple colour if financially possible. The ultimate dream for me right now, as a someone who isn’t mechanically inclined, would be a dark purple gen 1 Chrysler Concorde. I don’t care if I’d stand out or be an easier target for breaking into because I want that dream to live.
What y’all don’t like wet paint grey?! I’m thinking of painting my house wet paint grey.
Seems crazy to have a car these days that isn’t wet paint grey.
Lead paint. The only way to get these vibrant colours that last a long time is by adding various Pb compounds.
In the late 80s an Early 90s, they started using other chemistries, which is why the vehicles from that period had such terrible fading and flaking.
They finally got it right in the 2010s, but by that time, people had settled on monochromatic or boring colours.
When you do see colours, they are usually Navy Blue, Jungle Green or Burgundy.
TIL
oh there’s an actual answer and it’s not just capitalism this time. That’s rare.
Capitalised Science bought us TetraEthyl Lead and all the colours of the Lead Paint rainbow. True Science made us aware that aerated heavy metal fumes and particulate paint chips were not the best for our brains.
Mine is “Bristol” blue (a light tone) and has a little more than a year.
I gotta take issue with:
to properly accommodate the average American family’s collective weight of 78,000 lbs.
Hyperbole? The rest of the quote was sane. I think someone accidentally tacked a 0 on there.
Looked down a road yesterday and every parked car was white. I went another way.
I am sad about the lack of fun colors. I used to own two orange cars (a subaru crosstrek and a lotus elise), but now I’m stuck in a boring white truck.
