With color, it always comes down to personal preference. While some traditional hues still rank at the top of the list, trendier colors are nipping at their heels for consumer dollars.
Henry Ford favored black for his Model T, supposedly because the paint was cheap, durable and quick to dry. More than a century later, engineers are finding a whole new way to be efficient with paint and color.
For instance, they're infusing paint with microscopic dots that can use solar energy to power the radio, or with volcanic rock particles that diffract heat.
"With quantum dots, ultimately the entire surface area of your car could become a solar collector," says Christopher Webb, lead creative designer for General Motors. "And that energy could then be fed into the car and power who knows how many components."
Using volcanic rock and other minerals in paint would have a different effect: They could help reduce a car's interior temperature to require less air conditioning, thereby reducing fuel consumption.
It will be years before such high-tech paint makes it to market, Webb says, but other advances in paint technology already have made a profound impact on the color of cars and the choices people make.
Seeing in Black and White
Take white for instance, long considered boring to many Americans who associate it with rental or commercial vehicles. Thanks in part to special pearl and sparkle finishes, white is now the most popular car color in North America, according to DuPont's most recent Automotive Color Popularity Report. To jazz up traditional white, these new paint finishes, called tri-coats, include two layers of white paint — the second of which has the pearl or sparkle effect — topped by a clear coat.
Tri-coats, which first came out in the 1980s, have transformed workaday white into a multilayered complex color associated with luxury, says Susan Swek, group chief designer of color and material design for Ford North America.
Black, the second most popular color according to DuPont, is also getting spruced up with a sparkle effect. John Watts, senior manager of product planning at Acura, says black is his company's best-selling color and makes up about 25 percent of total sales in North America. "Black has always looked luxurious and rich. When it's clean, it looks absolutely fantastic," he says.
After white and black, the next most popular car color in North America, according to DuPont, is silver, followed by blue, then gray, red, beige/brown, green and yellow/gold.
Discuss: Is the color of a car's finish important to you?
Slumping Silver
Until white hit the top of DuPont's ranking a couple of years ago, silver was the most popular color in North America for seven years straight. "The bubble just had to break," DuPont's Lockhart says. "Silver is still a top color, but it's not No. 1 anymore."
For those who insist on sticking with silver, Ford's Swek says gold and beige tones will bring some variety to this color palette in coming years.
Neutral hues including sliver, black, white and gray are perennial favorites for car buyers and probably always will be, because people keep cars for relatively long periods of time, the designers say. Owners don't want to risk getting a crazy color they might hate in a year or that might make the car hard to resell.
The current economic downturn is only exacerbating consumers' conservative color choices. "People are more cautious about everything now," Watts says. "If they're out purchasing, they're going to be conservative and get something not too trendy that won't look out of place in a few years."
That's not to say cars on American roads will be relegated to shades of gray.
