Stock Rants #7: Car Colors

[kiya]

Because not all stock rants are actually about matters of import and substance.


There is kind of a mythology in USonian advertising, at least, that one's car is an expression of one's personality, independence, and nature, that this communicates something. Perhaps something rugged, perhaps something dedicated to family, perhaps something sporty and flashy and adventuresome.

But when I look at the cars actually on the streets, what I see confirmed with reliability - by that standard of mythology, at least - is "This is a nation of boring conformists."

Beige car.
Grey car.
Grey-blue car.
Off-white car.
Grey car.
Black car.
Dull red car.
White car.
Beige car.
Baby blue! How exciting!
Beige car.
Tan car.
Black car.
RED CAR LOOK AT ME BEING SPECIALEST OF THEM ALL TA-DAH!
Beige car.
Black car.
Grey car.
So dark blue it's really black car.
Tan car.
Off-white car.
White car.

My child loves colors. And when she's talking about cars she sees, it's: "Bwack. Bwack. Wyyyyte. Bwow. Bwack. WAD! Wyyyyte." A constant stream of this, with nary a "Bwoo!" or a "Yah-yah!" to be heard.

I fucking cheer the line of cars that appears to only sell in burnt orange and plum.

How the fuck do people find their cars in parking lots? "It's the ... beige sedan. Between the white SUV and the black hatchback, at least when I parked it."

And I know that part of the problem is that in order to get a car that's actually interesting or distinctive color-wise one generally has to go get the damn thing entirely repainted at a cost of umpty-lump, so people just pick from boring, bland, dull, unobtrusive, and inoffensive in the lot and don't go to the extra effort and expense. Perfectly reasonable; extra expense is extra.

But I still want a world where someone has a peacock-green iridescent minivan with stars on it. (Possibly me.) Where there are actually colours out on the highway, even godawful ones like lime green, rather than an endless stream of blah punctuated by the occasional flash of something interesting. Where the mythology of automotive personality actually lets someone be "raspberry metallic" if they fucking want to be pink.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

This is why people with art cars rock.

[marphod.livejournal.com]

We wanted to get our new car in a metallic-burnt orange instance, but none were available.

And this, we are sad. And in a dark blue car.


Although, the combinations of vehicle shape, brand, and color are extensive enough that you can usually find your car in 3-4 tries in a large, packed parking lot. You get used to the subtle differences between your car's model and the other cars in the same class, and then it shade is usually enough to reduce the number significantly.

Unless you own a Tan Saturn.

[trelana]

Or live in Vegas and have a black Mustang. Holy crap they're *everywhere.*

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

This is part of why I have a green car. (;

Forest green, by the way, is ninja-riffic. I have *never* been pulled over.

[fierceawakening.livejournal.com]

If I owned a car it would be black, but this post still rocks and I still love it like burning. :-)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I could have written this rant. This is a contributing reason to why I ended up with an Element. I was ready to settle for red as the most non-boring color available until I totally re-thought what type of car I was getting.

[brooksmoses]

Yes, this. suzimoses will agree even more vehemently than I do; I think she is fundamentally opposed to buying a car in a boring color.

Back in 1966, you could get your new Ford painted in any color you wanted for about $90 extra. If your color was in the standard fleet line (which had a good range of basic colors), the special order was even cheaper.

How the fuck do people find their cars in parking lots?

Based on experience with tiger_spot's beige Corolla, by remembering the particular shade of beige, roughly where it's parked and which way it's facing, and the details of the hubcaps. It helps that it is a bit old and so the hubcaps are not the originals, and thus are different from those on other beige Corollas.

I have a similar rant about shapes of minivans. Barring a rare few exceptions (which, IMO, are all ugly), all of the large minivans these days look approximately the same. No interesting styling at all; perhaps what they had was interesting a decade ago when the first one is new, but now it's everywhere. If I am going to get a many-seated vehicle to transport my family, I want it to be one that looks right painted with either large daisy-patterned flowers or like a Mondrian painting -- even if I am not actually going to paint it that way. Because, you know, a little more annoyance at boring cars and I just might.

[kiya]

This would be likely a tidy explanation for why 1966-era movies have much more interesting colors on the roads.

[brooksmoses]

Indeed! And it wasn't just the special-orders; the standard colors were more colorful and varied. (In 1965, Ford offered two different shades of bright red, along with a medium burgundy. And that's just reds; they also had four blues, two turquoises, dark green, two different pale yellows, and a sort of greenish gold and a bronzy gold. And white and black if you had to be boring. See not-too-accurately-scanned color chart here.)

Car colors definitely have trends like fashion, though maybe a bit slower. The late 1930s and early 1940s were about like today (except the common colors were in the black and very dark red/green/blue sort of range, rather than the beige/silver/white range -- about the same level of variation, though), and then the mid-1950s were bright pastels and rainbow colors and two-tone yellow-and-black and three-tone pink/black/white and that kind of thing.

[artan]

I'm fairly sure that adjusted for comparable purchase value, $90 of 1966 money could now get your car repainted in any single color you want after-market.

As for minivans - as soon as they start adjusting shape for optimal fluid flow to increase gas milage, they'll start converging on a common shape which is more efficient. I suspect that's what's happening there.

[kiya]

*finds an inflation calculator online*

Eh, $623.25 is a bit short of the $3500 standard I saw quoted earlier...

[brooksmoses]

Yup; and the inflation calculator I found said $500. That amount will get you a repaint job -- but with quite cheap paint, and probably slapdash masking and certainly no painting of door jambs and underhood and so forth. Last time we had a car repaired from someone backing into me, it was nearly $400 just for the paint to paint the hood and front bumper and one fender.

[shandrew.livejournal.com]

The 1966 factory paint job was about as good as a cheap paint job today.

For east coast cars, rust would begin around 1970, and without good care panels will be rusted through by 1974 if you managed to keep the car running that long.


Finally, it is easy for us USonians to find our cars in the parking lot; we simply buy a bigger car than everyone else.


(I would have bought a burnt orange mazda3 but alas, they were only available for a year. black it is.)

[suzanne.livejournal.com]

"I think she is fundamentally opposed to buying a car in a boring color"

You think? Have I not ranted enough to convince you? I will not own a beige car. Nor "gray," muted, silver, white, or black. Bright colors only. Blue, red, green, or yellow.

[submarine-bells.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much of that is regional? While black and white and silvery-grey are certainly pretty common colours here in Australia, I do see a lot of other colours on the roads with quite a bit of frequency as well. Just in my household, we have: my car (vivid metallic turquoise); Martindale's car (dark forest green) and Artyem's car (a sort of brick red colour).

Yellow cars per se aren't that common, but there was a fad for "gold" colours around the time of the Sydney olympics, and so there are a fair few cars on the roads in various shades of "old gold" shading through "metallic mustard" to "baby-poop yellow". Can't say I like 'em much, but they're there. And for the most vivid colours on the road, we must look to the hoon community, who currently favour extremely vivid shades of green and orange (not usually at the same time), both in brilliant metallics and poke-your-eye-out regular shades... and also very occasionally some kind of funky colour-changing paint that changes hue depending on your viewing angle, and is generally magenta/turquoise.

[brooksmoses]

I'd guess it's regional to the extent of car-manufacturer markets, but it's pretty much universal within the U.S. market -- or, at least, it's the same here in California as it is in New England.

Sounds like the Australian market, as usual, has notably more interesting cars!

[jinian.livejournal.com]

What people actually buy seems to differ somewhat within the U.S., at least. Here in Seattle the Anonymous Car is definitely a dark green Subaru Outback. And I do see more blues and greens here than elsewhere in general, which is the opposite of sensible from a visibility perspective!

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Certainly in the UK colour seems to go in fashions. When I bought my bright red Astra, there were a huge number of pillar box red cars on the road. More recently the fashion shifted to silver/grey. Unfortunately, the red paint used when I bought my car tends to lose its colour and unless I re-coat it every so often with pigment restoring polish, it ends up faded pink, which is perhaps one reason why red went out of fashion!

I would love a car in that amazing colour-changing paint. We saw one parked in town the other week that was that magenta/turquoise you mentioned. It made a bunch of mature adults stop for a couple of minutes so we could move around it to admire the colour changes!

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Yes, I also think it goes in fashions in the UK (I'm in London) - and because there's a strong used car market and people don't usually want the expense of repainting, that means there's quite a variety. Take yellow - my kids often play a "spot the yellow car" on long car or train journeys, because yellow is just infrequent enough not to be too easy, but common enough not to get frustrating. "Spot the orange car" requires slightly more patience, but is still a regular occurrence in our (claret-coloured) car because it's C's favourite colour, and we do usually manage a couple of scores per trip.

[kiya]

When I'm a passenger in the car and need something to do with my brain, one of my regular habits is 'find each car in rainbow order', which I actually started doing when hiking in Cornwall. So: after a red car, I look for an orange one, etc.

The difficulty in achieving this is roughly:

Red is easiest.
Blue is next most common.
(Small difficulty gap.)
Green.
(Moderate difficulty gap.)
Yellow.
(Large difficulty gap.)
Orange.
Purple is hardest.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, purple would be hard here too, although I do see some fairly regularly. I'd estimate I probably see them about half as often as orange cars.

[spectatrix.livejournal.com]

Shopping for cars, I was amazed by the number of greys/silvers that were offered for a single model.

I *was* going to go with "Alien Green" for my new Kia Soul, but one wasn't available locally with the options I wanted. Instead, I got sort of a denim blue color. Modestly different from others on the road.

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

Hester is a used Civic in a weird dark-maroon color that is nearly black. I've never been quite sure how to describe it concisely on documents where they want to know the color of your car.

[brooksmoses]

For what it's worth, vinyl auto wraps are probably a better choice these days than repainting if you want your car to be a different color, but they still cost a couple of thousand dollars or more.

[ivy]

I find my car by its bumper stickers and the thing hanging from my rear-view mirror. It is seriously fucking with me to have a temporarily naked car.

I wanted black. They didn't have black. So I got grey. I would have loved forest green if it had been available.

[kiya]

For better forested ninjing!

[zenten.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure here in Canada our HHR didn't cost anything extra to come in golden-teal.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I have to remember landmarks to roughly where my car is parked. And then I remember the license plate. That said -- there are rarely more than two or three cars that COULD be mine visible in that section as I approach it, so I don't really find the problem at all bad (and my current car is a dark metallic gray Camry, one of the commoner cars on the road). (My current license plate is "LENSMAN", so it's easy to remember.)

I think by conflating all the shades of grey you're making things sound much more uniform than they are, too; silver and dark metallic gray are nothing like each other.

I really hate that burnt orange that seems to be trendy right now.

[erstwhiletexan.livejournal.com]

This is why I drive a MINI and go to MINI rallies -- we always end up looking like a little rainbow of joy and checkers and Union Flags and turtles and and and. My baby brings joy to everyone around it. :) For most of my life we were a three silver car family and my car was extremely boring. If nothing else, I will not be driving a boring car again for a LONG time.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Our car is bwoo, if your daughter is yelling it out. But we had to go all over the Volvo dealers to find a Volvo in the type we wanted that was not white, beige, grey, or black. And we were buying "certified pre-owned" (high-class used), so we couldn't just get one ordered from the factory and wait.

One of the reasons the neutral colors sell so well is that people are buying them expecting to have to resell them--I have heard this from several people including my parents. If I was thinking in terms of resale, I wouldn't buy a Volvo. We are driving our old Saturn into the ground, and I intend to do the same with the Volvo. I will take care of the thing and keep driving it until I can't drive it any more--so if somebody else doesn't like the pretty medium blue ("Bering blue") we have, it's not my problem. On the other hand, I'm not sure if this is a mistaken preconception, because everyone ooohed over our blue one, and when we drive past the lot, they never keep red or blue for very long. So people may think grey resells well, but I'm not sure they're right.

[kiya]

I suspect it's the difference between "will not offend any potential buyers" and "will attract potential buyers".

If one's aiming for being inoffensive to anyone who might consider the possibility of purchasing the car, then neutral-bland is the way to go. If, however, one doesn't mind turning off a fraction of people in order to attract the person who will say "I WANT THAT ONE"...

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I have bright red because I actually *like* bright red, and because it beats silver. My last car was blue, but they didn't make that very long - I never managed to get my hands on a green golf. The red was standard issue and didn't demand an additional payment, so lots of people have it.

But yes. I'd rather put up with pink and lime green than silver, silver, silver, black, red, and silver.

[erispope.livejournal.com]

My first car was a peacock green Geo Storm. That's the only car of the three I've owned that I got to pick. And on the distant day when I (as Eddie Izzard says) have all the money in the world and can stick it in my ears, my car will be custom painted some bizarre-ass interference blue. In the meanwhile, I suggest many neat magnets and other adornments. Like, for instance, the sedate navy blue PT Cruiser that I drive now has a whole suite of Hawaiian hibiscus print covers in it.

[thastygliax.livejournal.com]

It occasionally takes a little while to find our white CR-V (a hand-me-down from E's parents) in a parking lot if you don't remember the exact spot. But it's also 2002, so the shape is distinct from all of the much more recent vintage SUVs around it.

My best friend in H.S. loved his car for its distinctiveness: a red sedan with white vinyl cab. He was very sad when it was totaled in an accident and he had to replace it with a Saturn the same pale metallic blue as 90& of all other Saturns in existence at the time. (In contrast, my mom's current Saturn is a nice, rich, eye-catching teal.)

If I had the money to get any car I wanted, with any paint job I wanted, I'd be VERY tempted to get a VW Beetle painted to look like an Egyptian scarab with a KHEPERA vanity plate. ;)

[alexmegami]

I used to have a green (teal-ish) car ('95 Corolla). Now I have a white one (basically the same car, slight difference. I think CE versus SE or something). But that's because I buy cheap used, and more for mileage than color.

My ex's parents had two Echos, one in what I affectionately called "piss yellow" (whatever passes for dull gold these days) and medium blue.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

My parents have a pleasingly turquoise-blue car, and a friend proudly drives Captain Carrot. So I think there might be slightly more brightly coloured cars in Oz than US (it's particularly the small cars that come in bright colours). But I have certainly noticed the trend for most cars to be black, white, beige, silver, or red, or colours close to those.

******

In Bangkok, there appear to be a number of rival taxi companies, who've each picked a different colour scheme - a few solids like orange, but lots of bright two-colour combos like green-yellow, red-blue, pink-purple.

As a result, "brightly coloured car" == "taxi" in the minds of Thais, and so every other car on the streets of Bangkok is black, white, or silver. At least that's how I remember it.