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Comment by wintermutestwin | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I find these "putty" colors to be very nice looking - particularly the gloss grey. It is the polar opposite of the "look at me" red cars of the past. There is a common idea that red cars get more tickets - not sure if that's true, but I have always chosen silver as it is more nondescript and also you don't notice dirt on it as much.

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People took that stat to mean that cops can see the red better and so can spot the speeder more easily. I always took it to mean that people who buy red cars like to speed.

I mean, red cars going faster is such a common trope it has got its own page on TvTropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RedOnesGoFaster.

Some insurance even has a surcharge if the car is red.

That's an urban legend.

No it's not: https://www.comparethemarket.com.au/blog/car/does-the-colour....

Maybe in Australia it's not. In the US it is a myth.

If you get a quote through the Australian site provided, you will be questioned about the color of your vehicle, and this is how that data was collected. Car insurance quotes in the US do not ask you what color your car is.

The linked article (to the extent that it's credible) suggests that:

1. Having any less-common color raises the price of insurance because, in the event of damage, the car will be more expensive to repaint. "For example, metallic paint can be more expensive than a standard colour and therefore the car may be more expensive to replace." 2. Gray and silver cars are the most likely to get into accidents, not red. (Red is #3.) 3. A price comparison site quoted the highest insurance rates for gray and black cars, not red.

The OP didn't claim that red cars were the most expensive, just that there was a surcharge for red which is true.

I've worked for insurance companies here in Australia and the UK. Not all insurance companies ask about car colour but some do. I assume it would be the same in many other countries.

I bet there's a hefty premium for Vantablack! https://www.bmw.com/en/design/the-bmw-X6-vantablack-car.html

Or, conversely people who like to speed buy red cars more frequently than other colors so that the majority of speeders end up driving red cars.

There is a story in the UK that red cars get pulled over more often due to police playing 'snooker'. In a game of snooker you have to pot a red ball every other ball... when playing with cars it means a lot more red ones get pulled.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snooker

He is claiming correlation not causation in the second. Correlation is symmetric, the converse is indistinguishable from the original.

> I always took it to mean that people who buy red cars like to speed.

maybe it's only because cops think the same thing you do

A car that is more visible sounds also safer.

Living in the rust belt, I have come to enjoy owning gray (or at least mid-tone) color cars. In the summer, we get dust and dirt which looks bad on light-colored cars and requires frequent washing. In the winter, we get road salt which looks bad on dark-colored cars and requires frequent washing. Neither is near as pronounced on gray, meaning I literally never wash the outside of my car. Rain and snow do it often enough for me.

I'm convinced that's the only reason people buy that ugly champagne color on cars. I hate it, but judging by a friend who never washes her car, it does not show dirt.

Work friend from Britain bought his first car in California with a dark grey paint job so it wouldn't show dirt. And then found out that dirt in California is light tan not iron/coal dust dark.

Had a VW in that color. It's very good at hiding dust, less so with real dirt. For city driving, yeah, it could be left unwashed for many months with no-one the wiser.

You should probably be washing off the salt regardless of appearances.

The nondescriptness of silver cars is a pro and a con - when I first switched to driving one there was an immediate increase in the amount of time it seemed to take for other drivers/pedestrians/etc to notice me, and I've had to adjust my standard of driving defensively to compensate.

Oh, I thought it was just me. I’ve come much closer to getting into accidents with gray cars, because I just didn’t notice them at a glance, or see the movement. Silver seems like a good color if you want to drive a getaway car, and a bad color if you have kids.

It's been studied, there is a crash risk increase for gray cars amongst other colours. I am on my phone and can't find am easy to access source except this:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09257...

Here's a PDF of what I presume is the same study by the same authors a few years before it was published in a journal: https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/216475/An...

I wonder if that's also true for scooter and motorcycles. I'm thinking about getting one of those, but ideally in some bright and highly visible color.

I imagine so, but I think you get more mileage from reflective high vis clothing.

Make sure you get to an MSF course, they teach you about lane positioning for visibility and defensive riding techniques. Some assume this means riding like Tom Cruise, but most saftey occurs by never being in an incident at all.

Good idea. If i go for a 125cc machine, i have to get some driving lessons anyway. Those are mandatory in my country.

It's definitely more interesting than the overwhelming majority of silver cars in the past 10 years, although I'd really like it if we had more colors in the roads (and used car lots)

I know there are serious logistical and maybe marketing considerations but I don’t know why Tesla, and perhaps any other brands that are primarily ordered online, couldn’t have a ton more colors available. Even if there’s a significant fee a ton of people would jump in it.

The last time I bought a car it was my Camaro. I wanted orange. They didn’t have orange. They had orange-red along with two other reds. I would have loved a deep forest green, but all they had was a neon green.

So I got white.

Car wraps are a good option since they have effects you can’t get with paint and act as a protective wrap that can be swapped later after damage.

I've lived thru Mary Kay pink, 1973 GM green, and merconium yellow. That bright grey is the most unsettling color I've ever seen. It's like what needs to be sewn back in after a blobfish knife fight.

The closest analogue I've personally seen is polish ziltz, pigsfeet in clear gelatin.

Silver has a marginal impact on crash risk, especially at night. It may be marginal, but being in a car accident is not something I want to do for a fourth time (never at fault). You might notice how hard it is to see your hood in bad weather if you have a glossy silver paint.

I tend to pick white now, which is also the best colour for hot climates like mine.

Neutral colors have the added benefit of being more easily resell-able (at a higher price), especially to private parties.

> Neutral colors have the added benefit of being more easily resell-able (at a higher price), especially to private parties.

Only for neutral cars. Flashy cars (like the Audis and Porsches described in the article) carry a premium when they're flashy colors. There are even whole events dedicated to unusually-colored Porsches (paint to sample).

That probably depends a lot on where you are. In large parts of the Bay Area expensive cars are ridiculously common and while I haven't gathered any actual data, my impression is that neutral colors are nearly as common for luxury vehicles as they are for normal vehicles. Seriously, a white/black/grey/silver Model S/X, RX/NX, X5/X3, GLC/GLE, Cayenne, etc. is a ubiquitous "soccer mom" vehicle around here. Of course you will also see your brightly colored 911s and similar. Oh, and those new (I think?) mid-engine Corvettes are everywhere.

Often this is because the paint itself is a more expensive option. In the end, neutral colors sell the fastest and most consistently. Colored cars have a smaller market based on the buyers tastes.

I buy it. There are some colors that just always look good on any car. They are fairly basic, but you can't really go wrong with them. Like black paint on a vehicle, black looks decent to good on just about anything.

black is great on a car, but very hard to keep clean, especially if there's a desire to avoid hairline scratches and swirls. There's also a need to avoid car washes to keep the car scratch free.

Grey/Silver color range is much easier to keep clean, and stays cooler in the sun.

> Grey/Silver color range is much easier to keep clean, and stays cooler in the sun.

That's true, however there's also a surprisingly big drop in reflectance going from white (~85%) to even a light gray (~50%). Now these figures are for "normal" flat paint used for steel construction, the glossy metallic paints used for cars probably have higher reflectances. But still.

Turns out there a lot more Camerys than there are Audis.

For some of us in hot climates, white has the benefit of being cooler in the sun.

Love all the rationalizations from it's easier to keep clean to resellable... That might be the one true millenial trait.

It's grey primer with clearcoat over it. How could that be a good thing?

It's also as invisible as possible against the background of an asphalt road. Also a bad thing. Unless headlights come on automatically in fog or twilight, that aesthetic will likely be a deadly one.

Very good point, this removes one layer of paint then. All cars have three (or four) layers of paint. This is two layers only.

The main reason could be to increase the profit for the maker (or reduce the market prize so they could compete). Should be also cheaper to repaint for the owner

It is not grey primer with clear coat. It is an actual pigment of paint.

> It is the polar opposite of the "look at me" red cars of the past.

Agree. The cars are now screaming "don't look at me!"

(I happen to like looking at cars however.)

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