I do a lot of kvetching about the sad lack of color to be found in the automotive world, and I think I’m right to kvetch, as we are in the grips of a severe chromatic crisis, where actual, genuine colors have been muscled out of our global carscape by the pervasive and insidious specter of achromatic colors. You know what I mean, the brutal grayscale horde, white, black, and a never-ending gradient of gray.
Anyone who looks out a window at any random road or parking lot knows what I’m talking about here; the vast majority of cars out there are some shade of gray. Sure, automakers try to mask this by giving the non-colors evocative names like Slate and Dusklight and Graphite and Ennui and Abandonment, but the result is a world further denuded of color.
This is a well established trend, not just in the automotive world, but among almost all human-made things. For whatever reasons, we seem to be sucking the color out of everything, and there’s even been studies showing this to be true. Also, it sucks.
That’s the global color chart from BASF’s 2023 Color Report, and you can see how dominant the grayscale goons are. It’s 81% achromatic! Ugh. How is it in just America?
Oh it’s a little better in America. 80% achromatic. Again, ugh. Has it gotten any better recently? Here’s the 2025 global report:
Oh crap, it’s worse. 88% grayscale. And that’s not even counting beige. Blue is the top color at 6%, then red and green at 3% – green making a sort of surprise increase here – and everything else is barely hanging on at 1%.
My headline was hopeful, though! And here I am being all gray and gloomy! But I am hopeful, and I’ll explain why: the past two press cars I’ve received have both been blessed with actual, real colors! Honestly, it’s been far too long.
The first was a Volkswagen Tiguan R-Line, which arrived in a deceptively subtle shade of green:
In certain lights, it had a golden cast to it as well, almost iridescent in a way I was not able to fully catch on film. Or pixels. Whatever. I’ll just say it’s better in person, and the color has some real depth and complexity.
Volkswagen calls it “Avocado Green Metallic” after that stuff you can put on toast that will eventually prevent you from being able to buy a house, or something like that. It’s definitely a real color, but it’s also subtle enough that it could be a good way to lure those candy-asses too afraid of real colors to come over to the side of light.
I liked it a lot, and I have to donate props to VW for offering an actual, if perhaps subtle, green.
But then the real whammy rolled up to my house:
Hell yeah, Toyota! Yellow has been my favorite car color for decades – over the years, I’ve owned, let’s see, five yellow cars, and still have two. And this Prius is clad in a wonderfully, unashamed yellow! It’s close to School Bus yellow, but not quite. It’s less orange, and a little deeper. Toyota calls it Karashi:
For those of you who don’t know, like me ten minutes ago, Karashi is a kind of Japanese Mustard:
Here’s how our pals at Kikkoman describe it:
Karashi / Japanese mustard (辛子 in Japanese) is a condiment made by adding powdered Japanese mustard seeds into water or kneaded into paste form in warm or cold water. Karashi is primarily sold in tubes in Japan. The distinctive spice, felt at the back of your nose, is perfect for enhancing the taste of Oden hot pot dishes, “aemono” (dressed dishes often made with fresh seasonal vegetables) or “natto” (fermented soybeans).
That “felt at the back of your nose” thing struck me as odd at first, until I realized I know exactly what they’re talking about.
This yellow works so well on the new Prius design – which is vastly better than the previous generations of awkward-looking Priuses – and it made me realize how a, say, silver Prius can just turn into another anonymous suppository, but put it in this yellow and then the sporty, sleek, fun aspects of the design really shine.
Color matters.
When the press fleet driver dropped off the car, he mentioned that he wasn’t sure about the color, and he said it like it made him uncomfortable. That struck me as sad, because it’s a reminder of how conditioned we have become to being uneasy with real colors, which is a miserable state of affairs.
But the fact that these two huge carmakers, VW and Toyota, have both decided to let their press fleet cars exist in bold, unashamed colors, I take that as a good sign, a sign of hope. If these are they cars they want the press to see, the cars they want photographed and shown to the world, then maybe, just maybe, that means the pendulum is swinging back to a world with colorful cars.
I have a vision! A vision that requires color vision, a vision of a future where our roads look like a bag of Skittles was decanted all over them, a myriad of color everywhere. Seeing these cars ignited a little spark of hope, a hope that we will be freed from this automotive grayscale prison, led out by mustard and avocado-colored cars.
We all just have to believe!
Oh great more black hole wheels.
I like the color of that Prius, but the car is still just about the ugliest vehicle I have ever seen. How can people like this but hate the Cybertruck? They both look background prop vehicles from a 1980s sci fi movie. The Prius also has bizarre proportions (the passenger cabin looks tiny compared to the amount of car below the beltline), the wheels are comedically oversized, and the windshield is excessively slanty. Taste is subjective, but this car is objectively hideous.
It isn’t even good looking by Prius standards. As we all know and agree on (though some are reluctant to say publicly for some reason), the first generation Prius is the best looking Prius. The second generation cars also look decent, although clearly aesthetics were a secondary consideration.
Why do we continue to perpetuate the myth that the fifth generation Prius is a good looking car?
I saw a Prius that color at the supermarket last weekend and I agree it looks really good. My wife commented that it looked like a sports car color but not in a bad way. Considering it has roughly 2x the horsepower and is something like 5.5 seconds faster 0-60 than the Prius we used to have I guess that fits.
I was at a rental car counter last week, and the clerk asked if I wanted a white, black, or gray car. My response was that that wasn’t really a choice, but he wouldn’t choose for me—I had to pick one. Are there really people who would see a difference between those non-colors?
Edited to add: the color wouldn’t have made a difference on what kind of car I was getting; it would have been a Genesis G70 regardless.
I would have chosen white.
Because you can’t drive white after Labor Day.
That green is so grey it looks like it could just be a grey car parked under a tree.
Like day-old guacamole – after it’s turned grey.
Heaven forbid we get fresh guacamole around here.
And the thing about that yellow Prius is you can’t get it on an LE, XLE or Limited. You have to go with the murdered-out Nightshade package to get it.
As if Yellow is allergic to a touch of chrome trim and not-black wheels.
When I was growing up, my dad had a friend named Bob. Bob liked yellow. Bob liked yellow so much that he owned a Hummer H2, an F-150, and a Porsche 911 all at the same time, and all in yellow. Even when his cancer confined him to a wheelchair, he insisted on purchasing a BMW motorcycle, and was pissed they didn’t offer yellow. I think he rode it maybe six miles. He passed when I was 11 but not before giving me the Craftsman socket set I still use today. Thanks for reminding me of Bob.
Nissan needs to bring back the orange they had on the XTerra.
That popped, I loved it.
Yeah that VW is too close to Gray to get excited about it, now the Toyota Yellow is something to celebrate, though Toyota has had some good colors on their truck recently.
Slate however is our best hope for color on vehicles. I found the Slate forums and there is a page for people to enter how they ordered their truck. The last I checked about 1/3 of the people reporting have indicated they have opted for a full wrap. Now it doesn’t say what colors but, fingers crossed, people are ordering the extra cost wrap because they don’t want grayscale. Hopefully other automakers take notice that people will order colors and are willing to pay at least the $500 minimum install it your self price.
Last car I bought, I asked about getting it in anything by greyscale and they suggested I wrap it.
Another avenue for dealers to nip a small profit on an accessory if the manufacturer doesn’t want to do anything about it.
The problem with wraps is they don’t last like paint and the installed price isn’t that cheap. I do think there will be some Slate buyers who ordered the wrap believing that Slate would really have someone local to them that will do the install for $500 and do a good job.
I think there’ll be quite a few owners who don’t understand the effort to wrap a car properly, and will be blazingly frustrated by the experience to promise never to do it again.
Oh, and a good eye-popping red, like Rosso Corsa. We’ve had several restored Italians painted in it. It’s only proper.
I appreciate a proper retina-burning yellow, one approximating the attention you would provide from a nuclear detonation in your face. But it only works on smaller cars, especially sports cars or sporty looking cars. Throw that paint on anything larger and boxy, and it looks like a school bus.
Yellow also works on big cars –
When I was a kid and Dad was taking delivery of our special-order ’72 Monterey Custom, there was a lady there taking delivery of her new special-order ’72 Marquis Brougham Hardtop sedan: Lemon Yellow with a white roof and interior, and a glass sunroof.
It looked like Palm Beach
World Rally Blue. British Racing Green. (whatever Subaru called the yellow on its WRX that one time).
We used to be a proper country.
I really don’t want to give that shade of green more credit than it deserves because IMHO it’s the first cousin of grayscale. Most manufacturers have been rolling it out lately and I think we’re so starved for color right now that we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Do I like a light forest green more than the 50,000 shades of gray in the German rainbow? Absolutely.
Is it a great color? No, it isn’t. It’s maybe a 6/10 on a good day. Give me a real forest green, BRG, or absurd lime green over it every single time.
The blue version is also becoming prominent. I don’t hate them, but I would appreciate a more saturated color.
Buick and Chevy have a purple version that is…interesting. It was very popular when I was at Buick though
A thing actually working against light and bright colors are the black model and brand badges. A black badge seems to “dirty” the area around it on a yellow car, whereas a silver or chromed badge makes the yellow pop even further.
Cars have so much black trim now that it’s a real issue for me, as you end up with a bright car that feels sullied in all these areas, whereas otherwise it’d really pop.
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Another thing is “murdering out” has been so popular. Dark grays and blacks, with black trim, black wheels, and heavy tint. I went to a car show recently and for the first time in my life, I had multiple people come up to me to say, “Thank you for bringing this!”
I was… confused! I didn’t bring a Carrera GT or a 906 something crazy. There are similar cars to mine around. Though I got it immediately — all the others are “murdered out.” Mine was the only one trying to be bright and happy.
My last few drives on I-81 I have noticed that the only vehicles with interesting colors have been the Trucks on the Tractor Trailers! That’s a shame.
Yup on big trucks you can order them any color you want w/o it being a big production. The county has trucks for moving the garbage trailers from the transfer station to the land fills. Instead of ordering them all in white they ordered them in a wide range of colors. I assume that is to make it easier to identify which truck is which. What every the reason I do appreciate seeing the rainbow of colors.
Maybe they got a discount on the end-runs of other orders in color.
Taste the Rainbow! Drive the Rainbow!
I’m part of the 1% of folks with a yellow car. Honestly Yellow, Teal, and Red are the best car colors
Yep. Just sold my speed yellow 987 boxster a few months ago, and it always turned heads.