For this past year, it seems the big news is that the achromatic (you know, grays, white, black) dominance is finally showing a few tiny cracks. According to the report: What It’s Like Unboxing A 1-of-1 ‘Beauberry’ Ford GT
So, the Grayscale Monolith still controls a shocking 81% of the market. And, it looks like blue and red, despite holding the highest chromatic percentages, dropped one percent, along with green, brown, and gold. But! There’s a surprise here, with violet – freaking purple – making a one percent gain and getting on the big board, along with yellow and orange! Hot damn! It also says green gained share, but then it also shows green dropping a point, so I’m verdantly confused. Man, violet, who would have guessed? I mean, we sure as hell champion the color here, but I’m a bit skeptical this was because of us. Was it? No. But a boy can dream. Let’s look at the regional breakdowns:
For my fellow Americans looking for an actual, genuine, unassailable reason to be patriotic, here you go: America’s percentage of real colors sold on cars is up, a glorious, rainbow bulwark against the cloudy gray mass encircling the globe. From the report: Black, silver and gray losing market share? Damn, it feels good to read that. Of course, the achromatics still dominate in America, like everywhere else. There’s other interesting details to note, like how South America tends towards lighter colors and yellow, oranges, and greens making European gains, while Asia grows even grayer. It’s interesting to look at all of this over time, too. A couple years ago someone on Reddit scraped 3.5 million used and new car ads from Polish websites between the years 1990 and 2020 to come up with this graph of color distribution:
Look at 1996! Achromatics were on the run! And look at all that green! Oh, and if you want to see the raw data, you can click here. And this chart only goes back to 1990; going back further, you can see that our carscape was once vastly more colorful, like the earthtones and colors of the 1970s:
…or the fearless pastels and two-tones of the 1950s:
So, while the global state of color in cars is still pretty boring, I’m going to allow myself to feel a little bit of hope, and maybe even a little bit of pride that America is leading the way back to color. Come on America! Let’s keep it going! And, rest of the world, don’t be afraid of color! Let’s push back the gray with a blast of cheerful yellows, elegant blues, vivid oranges, and, yes, glorious purples. It’s time. This Is What The Average New Car Face Looks Like In 2022 Here’s What Matt Farah Has To Say To You Forum Dorks Ripping On His Pink Porsche Got a hot tip? Send it to us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage. Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member. After hurricane Ian flooded and ultimately totaled my daughter’s (used to be mine) blue car we had a really hard time finding anything not white, black, silver, or gray. When we stopped by the Kia dealership every single K5 they had was matte gray. We ended up with a lovely dark metallic blue Mazda 3 which we had to wait for. One dealer offered to take off the paint color upcharge for a white one they had on the lot, but my daughter would not go for it. Had to be blue. Doing our part. On a separate note, for years my son was keeping count of all the purple cars he saw—averaged a couple a month*, but some weeks he’d see 3! *he was scrupulous about not double-counting, although it’s not like he was tracking license plates. really wanted the red, ended up with a very nice, but not what I really wanted dark grey. the problem is the dealers only order black white and grey.
