Gee, how exciting…
According to Axalta’s 2021 Global Automotive Color Popularity Report, people around the world have absolutely drab tastes. The firm reports that white still reigns supreme for car paint color choices at 35% of vehicles on the road donning it. Second place at 19% is black, tied with gray. Even more enthralling, silver is fourth at 9%. Really, this is just a reminder at how scared of actual color consumers are these days and that’s depressing.
Learn about Harley-Davidson’s aggressive electrification plan here.
Gray apparently is surging in popularity, climbing 4 percentage points in the past year so it ties with black. That’s right, gray, which is a mixture of white and black, is now gaining on white and black. It’s already the number one color is Europe, capturing 27% of the market, if you want to know what the future looks like.
Axalta says white became the dominant color among cars starting in 2011 and it’s all thanks to Asian consumers. Apparently, people on that continent just can’t get enough of the color which technically isn’t a color. However, white is on the slide now after hitting peak consumerism back in 2017 at 39%. That would be great news if something like red, yellow, orange, or anything more exciting were taking over. But instead it looks like gray will be the new market-dominating color. Yay.
Proving that North Americans are far more interesting and daring than other parts of the world, we do boast the highest percentage of red cars on the road at 8%. Sure, we’d like that to be more like 38%, so in a way that’s still depressing but not as depressing as in other parts of the globe.
There used to be a time at least in North America when we were more daring with colors. Sociologists, who are basically academic witch doctors, claim these experimentations with bright car colors only happened during a strong economy. Well, we had a strong economy not that long ago and we were still driving drab-colored cars, so there has to be a better explanation. Maybe we’ve just become unimaginative and boring? This is why classic cars are so awesome.
