I’m looking for a used car, and while I don’t mind driving older vehicles I would like for the paint to last a few years. The car will be kept outside and will be exposed to a lot of sunlight, so I’m more interested in which colors will resist oxidation in high sunlight.
I assume that paint formulation makes a much greater diference, but I don’t have any way to control this.
Some older colors of paint had problems with oxidation. You can see this on some of the 60’s and 70’s Chevys painted in red, they had a bad problem with oxidation.
Now all cars are painted with a top clear-coat that protects the paint and the oxidation problem no longer exists.
FWIW, I have no cite other than my own personal experience but silver and red cars seem to fair worse in the sun than others. I live in Florida and if you look around in traffic you always see older and some not so old silver and red cars with fading paint. Of course this will vary depending on how well the paint was maintained during its life. Frequent waxing and a car cover will go a long way to keeping paint fresh.
Yeah, I think I agree with both of you that there needs to be something over the color coat.
I’ve never owned a red car (and never bought new), but the black and metallic cars that I have owned had the paint jobs fail in short order. I wasn’t sure if it was just me or if darker and metallic colors fail sooner.
I think it’s more just a matter of whether the shade the original color fades into looks nice or not. Most reds, for example, are bad about this because they fade into an eye-watering off-pink color. Black just fades into a gross looking grey. I think blue works well, since most shades of blue look okay (if not particularly exciting) on a car. I actually have a 40 year old blue car with the original paint and if you look at some of the interior painted parts, the paint was originally much darker, but the car’s new color looks okay too. I also have an older yellow truck that definitely does not look as nice as it has faded to a sort of gross light mustard color.
But, like the others have said, thankfully with new cars this is something you have to worry about 30-40 years down the line instead of 10-15 like you did back in the bad old days.
My father-in-law lives in Florida, and had a fire-engine-red Lincoln Navigator (probably around a 2000 model). He’s a car nut, and maintains his cars well, but the Nav had to “live outside”, as it was too tall to fit in his garage. Despite being a newer car, with a clear-coat finish, the paint still faded very badly by the time the car was 7 or 8 years old.
The issue of fading happens a lot today. The reason is that paint mfgs. cannot use the cadmium-based pigments (too toxic) that gave us those vivid reds, greens and yellows in the 1960’s.
I remember the FIATs that were sold here in the 1970’s-the greens and oranges looked almost neon-like.
The pigments sed today do fade, particularly the reds and yellows.
I had a metallic light green flake car in the 80’s that oxidized so bad that it started rusting on the roof. The hood faded to almost white from the engine heat.
I swore to never buy another car with metallic again. I haven’t either. :mad:
Black Dodge trucks from late 90’s and early 2000’s = peeling clearcoat and paint.
Silver-metallic has higher fail rate from just about every year.
In the last decade, there has been much improvement in all cars, but you should know that Toyota paints have a terrible rep for being thin and overly prone to chipping.