Color is a power which directly influences the soul. —Wassily Kandinsky
Color is emotional and personal. On a canvas as large as a car, color shares something about the car’s owner with the rest of the world, says color consultant Kate Smith.
According to color experts such as Smith, white can express purity and youthfulness; black, mystery and power; gray/silver, dignity and elegance; blue, tranquility and wisdom; yellow, joy and optimism; green, revitalization and prosperity; red, passion and energy.
Give a child a piece of paper, colors, and ask him to draw a car, and surely he will make it red. —Enzo Ferrari
Using a prism, Isaac Newton discovered that white light consists of 7 visible colors. Conversely, black is the absence of light. As it happens, the 2 most popular car colors are white, followed by black. White and black account for nearly half of the car market, according to the automotive research company iSeeCars.com. They’re trailed by gray, silver, blue, red, and green. Other colors each have less than 1% market share, with yellow at the bottom of the bunch at a 0.1% share.
Why is white so popular? Maybe because of the emotional qualities associated with it. Or maybe because it’s the easiest color to maintain. Dust, dirt, and annoying small scratches and swirl marks don’t show as much on white. Silver and gray also are quite good in this respect. And white reflects heat, reducing interior temperatures. On the other hand, black is a maintenance headache and it absorbs heat. Why is it so popular? Go figure.
Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black. —Henry Ford (referring to the Model T)
However, white and black may be popular because new-car buyers usually don’t have to pay extra for them. Many automakers charge a few hundred dollars more for other colors. Porsche will paint a 911 any of more than 160 colors for upward of $11,000 under its Paint to Sample program, or any color you want for upward of $22,000 under its Paint to Sample Plus program.
A car’s color also affects its resale value. A strange thing happened during the pandemic: Because of the shortage of new cars, used-car values rose. According to more number crunching by iSeeCars.com, on average prices spiked by nearly 50% from 2019 to 2023. And, paradoxically, used cars that were painted some of the most unpopular colors rose the most.
After analyzing sales of roughly 10 million 1- to 5-year-old used cars, iSeeCars.com found that the prices of beige, yellow, and green cars increased dramatically—by 103%, 86%, and 75%, respectively. Red, blue, and gray also increased in value somewhat more than average. But the most popular colors, white and black, increased by only 48% and 47%, respectively.
Explains iSeeCars.com analyst Karl Brauer, “These price bumps aren’t a reflection of color popularity but of supply and demand. Not many people want a yellow car, but far more people want one than [yellow cars] exist.”
As for beige, it’s not a color that inspires a lot of passion. But iSeeCars.com notes that beige was a featured color on many limited-production trucks during the past 5 years, which likely contributed to the color’s increase in value.
Emotion, practicality, resale value: There’s clearly more to selecting a car’s color than meets the eye.
