White Most Popular Color for Cars in 2018

Axalta Coating Systems, one of the leading companies in the field of automotive coatings has just released its 2018 Global Automotive Color Popularity Report. The report says that white continues to be the most popular color around the world with 38 percent of the customers opting for white.

White was more popular than black, the second most popular color by a significant margin, with eighteen percent of buyers of new cars opting for black while silver and gray tied for the third place, with 12 percent each. Black, the shade of black used on the Model T, has become more popular in certain markets like China, South Korea, Africa and other parts of Asia. Gray became slightly more popular in Europe and in Africa. Other shades which have become more popular this year include neutral shades like orange and bronze as well as blue. Back in 1997, green was the most popular color in North America, but now it has fallen out of favor in the region.

This is the 66th year that Axalta has compiled its renowned report. According to Axalta, the Pantone Color of this year is called Living Coral.

Some of the regional preferences mentioned in the report include::
• In India and China, yellow and gold are really popular shades while blue is considered to be an “ecological friendly shade” in Japan;
• Gray is making inroads in the European market;
• The colors which demonstrated the highest gain in the North American market were shades of Brown/beige as they witnessed a surge of 2 percent year-over-year in popularity. This was the biggest gain for any region, though Russia saw a nine percent increase in that color;
• Red became less popular in South America; and
• Orange gained in popularity in South Africa.
Color preferences are said to be closely linked to the psychology of the consumers though it is not known if anything can be read in people’s preference for the color of the vehicle they choose.
“At Axalta, we believe a vehicle’s color is what you fall in love with first,” it said in the report. In fact, research shows nearly one-third of buyers will switch brands if the color they want is not available.