During my last visit to Kroger for a Coke Zero restock, I was blessed to see the wonderfully orange (metallic orange, no less) Lexus RC 350. Never mind that the actual color name is Molten Pearl, that car is orange. Orange AF, even.
As we are all aware, car colors are frequently barely colors at all these days, as Jason most recently wrote about here. Says Torch:
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.
I knew this to be true, but I didn’t realize how inured I had become to the grayscaleverse until that RC 350 warmed my retinas. It was like that scene in The Tingler when the otherwise black-and-white film renders a sink and bathtub full of blood in bright red. “Oh right, color!”
… and what a color. Orange is pretty much my favorite hue, not only for cars but basically anything meant to look cool in a coat of paint. Look, I even painted my latest RC (bud sadly, not an RC 350) in a bright shade of citrus:
So, more orange cars please (and all the other bright colors, too. How about you?
What Car Colors Do You Miss The Most?
ORANGE! but also greens. a nice dark green is fantastic. Not enough yellow cars these days either.
All of them.
I’ve had a blue van, a couple of silver cars, a sort-of honey-colored Civic, a black RAV. None of these are especially bold colors, though when the minivan started driving out from under its paint – thanks, Chrysler – my wife and niece painted mermaids and fish on the van and we drove it like that for a few years.
I also have a very blue pickup. At one time I had a red Subaru. At one time I had a rust-brown Civic – that was the color it was painted, a ruddy brown metallic. It looked like rust. Probably a smart strategy, that.
My mom has a bright yellow – I mean, BRIGHT yellow – Opel GT. It’s super tiny, so she decided it needs to be noticeable despite its size. It’s about the same color it was when it was new in 1971.
I get online and look at the color codes for vehicles of the same era as my truck: 14 listed. Ten years later, 16 listed. Ten years later, 2006: four.
FOUR. Pewter, black, beige, medium red. I’m hoping those are just the ones most requested for touchups and the dozens of other shades simply never get dinged in the parking lot.