BODYSHOP NEWS: Silver is King of Colours, says DuPont Color Survey

The French word for money is the same as that for silver, argent. So it is with some irony that the rise of the e-commerce age has been credited with the rise of silver’s popularity as a vehicle color.

Silver overtook the perennial leader, white, in nearly all vehicle categories in North America. White remained the most popular color for luxury vehicles due to new pearlescent effects using micro-sized mica flakes. Overall, black maintained its position as the third leading color choice. Blue, long a favorite color in Europe, continued to erode the popularity of green in all North American vehicle categories, including luxury, full and intermediate-sized passenger cars, sport and compact cars, and light trucks and sports utility vehicles. Gold emerged as a top-10 color in the light truck and sport utility category for the first time.

These trends are reported in the DuPont Global Color Popularity Survey for 2000.

“The world is shrinking fast and it no longer takes a year for a color trend to travel from New York to Paris or vice versa,” says Bob Daily, color styling and marketing manager for DuPont Herberts Automotive Systems, the OEM coatings unit of DuPont Automotive. “Today’s coatings technology also allows consumers to express their individualism without compromising product durability thanks to better pigments, improvements in metallic effects and advances in scratch and mar resistant clearcoats.”

In regard to future trends, DuPont reports strong individualism of consumers will be expressed in extroverted hues of yellow in some SUV-car crossover models. High chroma, the intensity of a color, will put more punch in reds and light blues for compacts and sports cars. Special effect colors that change based on the viewing angle and brilliant metallics for certain special edition cars and larger vehicles offer still more individualistic styling effects.

This trend is balanced with a more harmonious look, expressed in subtle neutrals, mainly in white and silver. These colors will feature surfaces for luxury vehicles achieved through micro-mica flake for pearlescent coatings, according to the DuPont study.