Purple Is An Underrated Car Color

The current state of the automotive palette is a bit of a shocker. Look in any parking lot and there’ll be a sea of almost non-color, as black, white, gray, and silver dominate.

It’s not your imagination either: at least 70% of new car registrations in 2025 comprised those four colors in the USA and in the UK. Only blue gets into the top five on both sides of the Atlantic, adding up to a combined 85%.

New car buyers overwhelmingly opt to play it safe, it seems to save money on expensive paints and for wider appeal when it comes to selling it on, but they can also only buy what car brands offer. That becomes a vicious circle too: the brands don’t spend money developing interesting paint because it won’t sell, and it doesn’t sell in part because they don’t offer it.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as a press release from Bentley reminded us. The British brand recently celebrated its 80th anniversary at its Crewe HQ, and the opening of a new paint shop by Princess Anne, by launching a one-off Continental GTC in “Purple Supernova Ombre.”

Although few brands offer it these days, purple is the underrated automotive paint shade, and while marques like Bentley can come up with whatever paint they want for their six-figure luxury cars, there have been some pretty spectacular examples of purple cars in more mainstream stuff over the decades.

It’s a color that makes bad cars interesting and good cars even better, and I’ve pulled out some favorites to hopefully poke a few manufacturers into realising their designs deserve more than monochrome.

When Chrysler decided to build a literal hot rod in the late 1990s, it needed a bold color to match that whole vibe. Prowler Purple was a deep metallic shade that helped drive the message home when the Plymouth Prowler concept was revealed in 1993, and every single Prowler that rolled off the assembly line in its first year (1997) was finished in this vibrant violet hue. Its semi-sibling PT Cruiser later sported a very similar color.

While Bayside Blue was the default color choice for the R34-generation Skyline GT-R, it was Midnight Purple II that really showed off the car’s physical form.

There have been three generations of Nissan’s Midnight Purple, and although it started with the R33’s subtle, mostly black shade, it wasn’t until the II and III that the purple shone through. Nissan even leaned on the heritage of Midnight Purple for a new color for its run-out models of R35 GT-R, too.

The E36-generation BMW M3 is usually remembered for moving the M3 game on from its four-cylinder origins to the straight-six era, but it also birthed one of the M Division’s best paints and with one of the better names here: Techno Violet.

It was such a good color that BMW replicated it almost faithfully for a celebratory model as one of the five exterior options for the M3 50 Jahre – and left it off the corresponding M4 model.

For a brand usually known for its blues, Subaru sprang a bit of a surprise when it announced a limited-run variant of its rear-wheel drive sports coupe finished in Galaxy Purple Pearl. Although it only offered 500 cars (dubbed “Series.Purple”) painted in the hue, it was a pretty spectacular finish that complemented some of Subaru’s earlier “Series.[color]” cars.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Carlos Gonzalez ???????? (@typer064)

So far so good, if you want performance cars and coupes, but Honda was democratizing purple in the 1990s too with the absurdly named Royal Grape Purple Metallic. As far as we can tell, it was applied exclusively to the domestic four-door Honda Civic Ferio in admittedly upper-tier Vi-RS trim but again provided a fabulous splash of deep purple to the car parks of its native Japan.

The third-generation, five-door Volkswagen Golf wasn’t the most interesting car to look at – no hating here, I learned to drive in one – even in the more potent trims, but once again purple shows how very different a car can look in the good color. Dusty Mauve Pearl wasn’t a spectacular name, but the color itself was one of those that really pops in the daylight. Of course it helped that it was only available on the VR6 Highline …

Although the pun is almost enough to disqualify it, Jeep’s Prince-ly purple “Reign” shows that even off-roaders and trucks can get in on the game. Originally introduced in 2022, only a few years after its first-ever purple, Reign was initially only available on the Wrangler on a limited basis.

Stellantis brought it back “by popular demand” on the Wrangler and Gladiator for 2026, which at least shows that, even in the current grayscale automotive landscape, if brands make interesting colors, people will buy them.

Top graphic images: Stellantis; iOS