Colorblind: “Grayscale Palette” Applies to Most Car Color Preferences, With Exceptions

If any car deserves a cheerful color palette, it’s the Mazda Miata, introduced in the U.S. for 1990 in your choice of bright red, white, or blue.

Now, muted variations on that original red, white, and blue are still offered, but so are four additional colors: black, two shades of gray, and Zircon Sand Metallic, which Mazda says is an “earthy tone.”

It’s kind of a funeral, this trend toward neutral car colors. That was not overlooked in our review last week of a 2024 Mazda Miata Club that Andrew Newton drove: The Miata’s color options are “bland as a bowl of sawdust,” he wrote. “If you’ve been praying for a handsome British Racing Green or a nice bright blue, keep praying, because Mazda has ignored you yet again. There is a new shade for 2024 but it’s… another shade of gray.” His test car was Zircon Sand, which he described as a “sort of muddy sand color, with some green in it.”

Turns out that it isn’t just the Miata—the entire industry has been steering away from colorful cars, according to a study by the website iSeeCars.com. Grayscale colors (white, black, gray, and silver) made up 80 percent of cars in 2023 compared to 60.3 percent in 2004, the study said. This despite the fact that there were nearly the same number of colors offered in 2023 as there were in 2004, with an average of 6.7 colors per model today compared to 7.1 colors per model 20 years ago.

iSeeCars analyzed the colors of over 20 million used cars from model years 2004 to 2023 sold from January 2023 to April 2024. The share of each color within each model year was calculated, as was the difference in share between model years 2004 and 2023.

“Colorful cars appear to be an endangered species,” said Karl Brauer, iSeeCars executive analyst. “Despite a diverse palette being offered by automakers, there are far fewer non-grayscale cars sold today. They’ve lost half their market share over the past 20 years, and they could become even rarer in another 20 years.”

Colors like gold, purple, brown, and beige have each lost more than 80 percent of their share over this period, and even mainstream colors like green, red, and blue gave up some ground. Interestingly, green has made a small comeback in the last few years as the only non-grayscale color to gain some market share back since 2020.

And it isn’t just cars. “Trucks followed the overall market trend, though some primary colors, like red, lost far more share than others, like blue,” said Brauer. Red is down 57 percent in the truck segment, while blue lost less than one percent.

“If drivers think they’re seeing less color on the roads these days, they are,” he said. “Every non-grayscale color lost ground over the past 20 years.”

It should not come as a surprise, then, that color affects resale value, but it doesn’t necessarily follow the grayscale-dominant formula. Hagerty Valuation Analytics Director John Wiley wrote a year ago that cars “slathered in eye-catching colors never fail to garner attention. The degree to which those colors impact value, however, can vary wildly from model to model.”

For vehicles with relatively few trim choices or minimal differences, color can be a much more important consideration, Wiley said. The 2012–13 Ford Mustang Boss 302 didn’t offer a lot of options, but it did allow buyers to select from 10 colors: Black, Competition Orange, Gotta Have It Green, Grabber Blue, High Performance White, Ingot Silver, Kona Blue, Race Red, School Bus Yellow, and Yellow Blaze.

Three of those colors—Black, Kona Blue, and Yellow Blaze—can mean a discount of up to 11 percent (sorry, Yellow Blaze) on the average value, while three other colors, High Performance White, Competition Orange, and Gotta Have It Green can provide owners a premium of about 17 percent.

Wiley wrote another story in 2021 about how color affects the value of Chevrolet Corvettes. Comparing apples to apples, the research was applied to 1700 sales. “The median premium for each major color group reveals white as the most valuable [adding 8.9 percent], followed by yellow, purple, and red. At the other extreme are earth tones like copper, green, bronze, and brown [down 10.2 percent].”

Still another story from that year explored what color does to Porsche 911 values. “The winner? Yellow. Porsches painted that color tended to sell for nearly $3000 more than average.” At the other end of the (color) spectrum, “black Porsches tended to earn $1385 below average.”

If you’re talking about a pure, mainstream, just-transportation car like a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord, the exclusively-grayscale palette may be a good rule of thumb to help bring solid resale values. But for sportier cars, the answer may lie somewhere over the rainbow.

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