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?
I miss anything that is not black, white or silver/gray
I’m late to the comments but yeah, anything. I just checked the BMW M2 configurator and there are 2 whites, 3 greys, and 1 black.
OTOH I currently own a BMW in “Sunset Orange Metallic” and a C6 corvette in “Atomic Orange”, an orange so bright that it makes the BMW look red.
After looking at this:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/americas-most-popular-car-colors-1996-vs-2025/
All of them.
Damn, that is depressing. Everything really was better in the 90’s.
You should have seen the 70s. The HP wars had color wars built in.
The lack of various greens and blues. I was shocked how much I missed seeing baby blue available on a car until I saw it recently on a Cadillac. Nobody is talking about how Cadillac is secretly bringing color back into the auto industry.
The 90s saw an explosive amount of color availability with teal being a pretty popular color in the early part of that decade. I’ve had two teal cars back then and would probably never get that color again, but I feel like it should at least be an option for those that like it.
However, it’s brown. I miss brown as an option. In honor of my grandpa, I would have ordered my Challenger in brown if it were an option back then. His brown 71 Plymouth Satellite Sport was an inspiration to me when I was just a little dude back in the early 70s.
There was a certain amount of confidence in car manufacturers back in the 70s that meant they could successfully market bright pink as a ‘manly’ performance colour – both in the USA and here in Australia. And of the ’70s Leyland P76s I have owned, one was Oh Fudge, which was a chocolate brown (plus someone had later added a cream Starsky and Hutch style stripe, and later covered it with a cream vinyl roof!) Another was Bitter Apricot, which was a terra cotta colour. And a friend owned a P76 Targa Florio (limited edition ‘commemorative’ sports model) in Nutmeg, which was a very nice Metallic dark brown.
And I have a soft spot for greens – the pastel green (Leaf Green) on my 1962 Chrysler Valiant is a very nice colour, especially with the darker green vinyl interior)
British Racing Green
Er, all of them?
As I have said here before, I miss the days when highways and parking lots looked like a spilled bag of Skittles, and not a black and white photo with the occasional pop of added color.
There’s almost no color outside of grayscale I wouldn’t want to see more of, but deep purple and teal would be wonderful.
The pearl gray green of my late 2004 Acura TL, RIP. Most greens today, there are a few, are unpleasant to my eye.
At this point I want anything that’s actually a color. Most parking lots and dealer lots looks like the color palette was inspired by an East German government housing block on an overcast day.
Agreed. ANY color is better than greyscale at this point, even if it’s vomit, or meconium, or even mauve.
I’ve got a particularly soft spot for robin’s egg blue, slightly desaturated teal, very dark purple metallic, and almost any shade of green on a car. I’ve yet to personally own a car in any of those colors. 🙁
Yellow my daily is a yellow tc 2 and it makes me smile everytime I see it, I can also never lose it in a parking lot.
90’s teals and pinks need to come back
All of the honda greens: midori, samba, and that purple pink mist color too.
Purple needs to come back.
All these colors need to be on entry level and mid trim cars not just premium brands.
The death of colors has a lot to do with greys blacks and whites being no money options on a lot of new cars.
Dodge had an Emerald Green that was gorgeous. I miss that color.