Drives me nuts. In this vibrant world we live in, and thinking of all the cool things modern paint technology can do, we all drive refrigerators. Well, not me, my car’s Estoril Blue, but I almost never see another car painted the same despite it having been an option for a decade or more.
I am concerned that I started this gray trend. Back in 2001 I bought an Audi TT-R that was in a glossy, primer gray. My mom asked if we were big fans of Navy battleships. But it got a lot of attention at the time. I got asked about the car, and specifically then color just all the time. it was also supposed to come with the super-trendy baseball glove stitched interior but something got screwed up and I got boring black, but that was only the first of many disappointments that car dealt me.
I remember the time when Toronto police cars were a bright yellow. Certainly stood out. (Although they’ve always had the plain unmarked cars)
“Battleship Grey” is what I started calling it, the obvious name that came to mind when I noticed the trend. OTOH, I bought a white tesla for the sparkle, paid an extra $2,000 for the colour, then they made if the freee colour. My wife recently bought a used car (2023), it’s dark blue. But bright colours are a lot less common nowadays.
I’ve always noticed a trend (ever since car colors became limited to maybe six choices for a given model) for the more interesting/brighter colors to be available in lower trim levels and boring colors in the higher trim levels. Is seems like the manufacturers think once you can afford to spend more for a car you want more dignified colors.
(I’ve never purchased a European car or a sports car so I don’t know if that trend holds true in those cases.)
I am not a fan of gray cars. Not sparkle, not flat, not Nardo, or whatever they’re calling it.
Where I live, gray cars become invisible. We have gray skies, gray weather and gray roads. Coupled with fewer people using their headlights during the day, I sometimes just can’t see them.
I had the closest call I’ve ever had for a head-on collision a few months ago due to this very thing. I didn’t see the oncoming vehicle until I was right in its path. I rarely pass, and when I do, I need to feel sure that I’ve checked everything before committing to the move. Thought I had, but still didn’t see The Disappearing Truck in the rain. Fortunately, everyone involved in the near-miss did everything right to avoid the collision, and I’m here to tell the tale. But it was scary as fuck.
My cars are always brightly colored: Screaming yellow, green or red. I always drive with my headlights on, too. Make yourselves visible, people!
The only Hyundai I’ve seen it that color is the boxy new Santa Fe that looks like it was made in the Eastern Bloc back in the seventies. Until that model I thought they were pretty nice looking cars.
They all looked like New York City cabs. It was a pretty silly concept. There were jokes about drunks getting into the back seat of a parked yellow police cruiser and demanding a ride home – and I suspect that might have really happened many times!
Except cabs in Toronto weren’t yellow. That was something odd I saw when we went to New York back then, the cabs all looked like our police cars. So drunk Americans wandering in Toronto… maybe did need a ride to the lock-up.
Given Nardo Grey was explicitly chosen to match the colour of a wet road, one does wonder what the heck the fashionistas responsible were thinking. Clearly the answer is that actual logical reasoning was beyond their ability.
The expression “victim of fashion” could come to have a much grimmer meaning.
Car paints up until the mid-late 1970s were fairly massive sources of pollution as they were sprayed and cured. Both at the few but huge factories and at every little body shop and car painting store scattered across the country.
The early paints they could make in the newly required low-VOC formulation had to be blah weak colors. Call it “the beige car era”.
Those paints were also not very durable. Anyone who ever lived in the sunnier parts of the country recalls the many barely 5yo cars with “sunburned” paint: sunburned car - Google Image Search.
Eventually they improved the chemistry and curing methods so that bold low-VOC high durability paints can be made affordably. Sunburned cars of the last WAG 10 model years are all but non-existent.
But meanwhile the damage was done. The public had gotten mostly used to blah colors, the dealers were ordering all the cars for inventory in blah colors thinking those would sell best, and the mutual feedback loop of people buying whatever was on the dealer’s lot kept that going. Green was one of the large victims of all that.
Right now you can buy a green car from the factory from several manufacturers. But not the cheap ones.
I swear the first time I saw that gray on a car i thought, did the owner buy gallons of Testor’s Gray Paint (used for those polystyrene model kits) and go to town? Same with a sky/light blue of similar appearance. I think those colors make a car look cheap. I hope it’s a trend that dies off.
That’s funny. The non-metallic, gloss paint style (without metallic flakes or pearlescent particles) used on recent cars are reminiscent of Testors paints. No variation in color tone and with a high gloss. Using Testors on models made them look fake – like toys.
TBH, I like this style – even the grays. These cars look fresher, more modern next to standard metallic and pearlescent styles. Judged on their own, the grays are drab and blah, but out on the road they stand out.
I HATE that primer grey color. It makes the car look like a state trooper, or a vehicle that someone forgot to paint. I always think “cop car” when I see one.
Interesting. I have never seen a gray cop car in any of the 6 states I’ve lived. Are they common wherever you are?
There are lots of things I think of when I see a gray car, but “police” is absolutely not one of them. Even the fully unmarked fully stealth cars I’ve identified are ordinary colors: white, black, tan, silver, blue, etc.
I watched a white Nissan family wagon light 'em up and do a traffic stop a couple days ago. I did not expect that from a Mom-mobile.
Clay gray, and similar wallpaint-like colors are reasonably common here in the UK, by which I mean approx 2% of cars.
I don’t particularly like the shades but it’s good that there’s starting to be some variety in colors and paint styles.
I remember being on a street in china with a friend, observing that no non-white cars had passed by for the last few minutes. Then we proceeded to watch in disbelief as the next 30 or so cars were also white, and we walked away still having seen no other colors.
And no, we weren’t near to a car factory It was just the peak of people wanting a car that looked like an iphone (at the time iphones were white).
It was just the peak of people wanting a car that looked like an iphone (at the time iphones were white).