It’s less of a drum roll and more of a sad trombone. Data for most popular car color in the entire world has been crunched and the winner is, once again, white. Not only that, but it’s the 10th consecutive year that white has topped the global list. It’s been a decade of white.
More than one in three cars built in 2020 was white, running away from the rest of the field at 38%. It’s the third year in a row that white has held steady at that percentage. Black came in second at 19%, followed by gray at 15% and silver at 9%. That means over four out of five cars made in 2020 are black, white, or somewhere in between. Grayscale is a worse pandemic among cars than it was in Game of Thrones.
The report was put together by Axalta, an industrial coating company, to help automakers predict trends (and presumably to sell more paint). Said an Axalta spokesperson, “We’re pleased to share this data … to work with our customers to bring dynamic colors to life.” Except, these aren’t really dynamic colors, are they?
Compared to a U.S. survey released in October, America is a bit more colorful than the global average. The black-white-gray-silver spectrum comprised slightly less of the overall global total, at 77%. Our next most popular colors are red and blue, which comports with the rest of the world, though in Europe, Japan and South Korea, blue ranks a bit higher in fourth place. India is the only region in which brown and beige climbed into the top four. Greens, yellows, and the remainders are so rare they get grouped into an “others” category that hovers around 1-3%.
The news isn’t all bleak, though. Axalta says blue is trending, while silver is on the decline. And Axalta’s own Color of the Year is Sea Glass, a green-blue shade inspired by bodies of water.
Still, those are relatively small fractions compared to the monochrome juggernauts. For now, expect your local parking lots to continue to resemble a formation of Star Wars Stormtroopers.