“This marked a big step for industrial mass production of the Model T and other low cost automobiles, since it synchronized the painting action to the frequency of the assembly line,” Tutt writes in her thesis. That long, expensive process is what prompted Ford to develop asphalt-based baked enamels for his cars - dark colors lasted longer, it fit in with the assembly line process and didn’t take as long to dry. There was no binding medium, Tutt says, so every time a color would fade or yellow, it’d have to be repainted. The color was luxurious, providing for brilliant paint jobs, but the paints couldn’t stand up to time and would end up turning yellow. It was a complicated, expensive procedure to to apply the paint, and the drying time took several weeks. So she knows her stuff, it’s safe to say.īack around 1900, Tutt says, cars were basically motorized carriages and thus, painting methods were derived from the oil-based coating formulations used for traditional horse drawn carriages. Her doctoral thesis is titled “History, development, materials and application of automobile coatings in the first half of the 20th century,” and she’s a member of the Society of Automotive Historians.
Not really - and as it turns out, there were some pretty spectacular car colors around the turn of the century, explains Gundula Tutt, an automotive color historian, conservationist and restorer living in Vörstetten, Germany. So now that we know the reason for popular car colors now, we wanted to figure out why, if perhaps trends are always or often tied to current events like a recession or depression.īack to Henry Ford and his “any color as long as it’s black” statement: To quote Jerry Seinfeld, “What was the deal?” Was it because everyone was just in a a really cranky mood and just didn’t feel like happy colors? This effect also works for green cars (Polynesian Green!) and orange (Tangerine Scream!) as well as teal (Just Teal ). Meaning the likelihood of a flood of yellow cars on the market is not great, hence, the rarer it is, the higher price tag it can command. In fact, if it feels like we’ve returned to our grayscale roots, we have: Last year for example, the most popular car color in North America was white, reports Forbes, followed by black, gray and silver.Īnd yet in that same article, Forbes discusses how popular a color is doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best value, noting how a yellow car bought new will have a higher resale value down the road - pun completetly intended - than your more everyday tones.Īs it turns out, during the recent recession, consumers were a bit shy of flashy things and tended to play it safe when and if they took the big step of buying a new car, and that trend has persisted over the years. It feels more like the Model T days, of which Henry Ford wrote in his autobiography: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black” (more about that later). This came up in the Consumerist newsroom we call a conference call - everyone remembers that one car with the special paint color - Polynesian Green, Clover Green Pearl, Deep Maroon 347 - perhaps more than any other aspect of the beloved former ride.īut when you look around on the road and in your neighbors’ driveways, not everyone is driving in the technicolor lane.
FIRST HOVER CAR FREE
Paint is one of the most important design aspects parts of a car - the right paint job can mean the difference between luxury and sport utility, can turn Grandpa’s jalopy into a teen dream machine, and forever change a car from a vehicle you use to get around to a statement on free love and drugs. Cars are everywhere, and so are the colors they’re cruising around in, their own distinctive skins.
Really what you’re seeing is Vanilla Shake, Tahitian Pearl and Torched Penny.
You don’t know their names, but you see them everywhere: countless shades of reds, greens, blues, grays, tans, taupes, whites, off-whites, charcoals, blacks, gold and silver.
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