Feeling blue about car colours

Too much?

What’s your favourite colour?

And what colour is your car? I’m confidently predicting a discrepancy.

If you said black, grey, white or silver for your motor, you aren’t exactly alone. 70% of cars sold last year were one of those thoroughly-unexciting drab specials, according to the society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. More than 1.75million vehicles were unleashed onto our roads in 2017, whose proud new owners opted for one of these plain, safe, easily re-sellable blandmobiles.

With just 0.4% and 0.8% going for yellow and orange respectively, it seems we’ve settled on boring, despite regularly banging on about what a vibrant, innovative, nation we are. 16% went for blue (which is still pretty reserved, unless it happens to look like the sky on a mid-summer day), whilst only 9.9% went for the colour of my current wheels, red.

There’s a literal, but very faint, glimmer of hope on the horizon though, with demand for gold soaring to a mighty 0.2%. Presumably that’s exactly the figure correlating to footballers buying new Range Rovers, though.

When did we get so staid? Was it the General Election? Brexit? Toblerones having more space between the peaks? It’s got so bad, black has now taken over from white as the most popular non-colour.

So... what’s your favourite colour? If you’re buying a new car soon, treat yourself – and the rest of us – to something a bit less monochromatic.

This post first appeared as the second piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 2nd of February 2018, where it was re-titled as "Car dreams fade to grey".

The whole paragraph about being staid got cut, for some reason.

For the record, my car history in colours is: orange, white, black, red, dark green, black, dark blue, silvery light blue, red. I win.

(CD A-Z: More of Midge Ure's "Move Me".)

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