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While traditional car finishes are still popular among U.S. consumers, paints inspired by rich, dark espressos, multihued music devices and cell phones are quickly gaining acceptance.

By Matthew de Paula

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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.

 

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.

Color Resurgence
Automakers are focusing efforts on small cars, and as new models come to market, bright colors will blossom. “Typically, bright colors are best used on small cars,” says DuPont’s Lockhart. “If you put a really bright color on a large car, it may be a little too much for the consumer to take in.” That’s why the millions of large cars and trucks sold in the United States are painted mostly in muted tones.

Experts are excited at the possibility of an explosion of color. Swek’s voice kicks up a notch when she mentions the bright magenta that will be available on the Fiesta, Ford’s new small car set to go on sale in the United States in the summer of 2011. “The color evokes a sense of high fashion,” she says. “It doesn’t go on a lot of vehicles, but the Fiesta can handle it.”

Swek is also keen on green. “Lime green is a huge trend color,” she says.

Green was popular in the mid-1990s, but fell out of favor and had remained so. Interestingly, not even the recent surge of hybrid gas-electric vehicles and hype about “green” technology in recent years could bring it back, Lockhart says. Instead, the eco trend brought a surge in popularity for blue, which emerged as a color that evoked earth-consciousness.

Blue is now the fourth most popular car color in the United States, behind silver, according to DuPont. “We see that there is a trend toward waterlike blues, or blues that resemble water,” Lockhart says.

Down With Brown
Car buyers are getting into another color whose heyday goes back even further than green. “Brown has not been in the auto industry since the 1970s,” says GM’s Webb. “Briarwood Brown was the last successful brown on a Cadillac.”

Market research showed consumers associated brown with dirt and mud. “Now it’s seen as premium,” Webb says. “Starbucks and high-end coffee lent to that trend.”

More than one-third of Saturn Auras are sold with a premium Morocco Brown interior color scheme, Webb says, and a similar interior is popular on Hummers.

Acura’s Watts is also seeing an increasing interest in brown. “We’ve introduced a new color on the TL called Mayan Bronze Metallic and it’s really taken off,” he says. “It’s almost like the signature color for that line.”

A couple of bright colors have been popular and will remain so. “Orange came in five years ago,” Webb says. “I thought it was a trend, but it went absolutely mainstream.”

The Global Palette


Although it takes a special sort of person to get inspired by a tube of lipstick or a colorful dish at a restaurant and create cars of similar hue, there’s no question that color is pivotal to how people see the world. And it seems the world is homogenizing when it comes people’s tastes in car colors.

“Each continent used to be very different,” Lockhart says. “North America had a lot of sparkle and chromatic colors; Europe was finer and less chromatic, grayer with more neutral tones. Now we’re seeing a little bit of the same all around the globe.”

Lockhart attributes this to the fact that people travel more and are expanding their social spheres beyond local communities. “Someone will go to Bali and see an orange cloth there that they really like and bring it back with them,” she says.

At the same time, consumers are getting savvier. They’re closely following design trends for home and fashion. “Generally speaking, auto colors tend to follow home furnishings by three to five years,” Acura’s Watts says.

One reason for this lag is the time needed to create paint durable enough for automobiles, which means several years of testing by the paint manufacturer and several more years of testing by the automaker before a new color or finish is ready for production. But it’s just as important to take care in creating the right look, especially given the recent designer-speak about a car being the biggest thing people wear.

Matthew de Paula wanted to be an automotive journalist ever since reading his first car magazine in grade school. After a brief stint writing about finance, he helped launch ForbesAutos.com and became the site’s editor in 2006. Matthew now freelances for various outlets.

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