No Fixed Abode: If You Had A Choice Of Colors, Which One Would You Choose, My Brother
No, that’s not my lime-green Audi S5 in the photo above. Nor is it that car’s Malaysian rip-off. It’s a totally new thing, a “Pfaff Performance Series” available for the low, low price of $68,000 CAD, which is $54,000 USD. That’s almost exactly what I paid for my S5 eight years ago, so it’s not necessarily a bad deal.
Except this car sucks in every way you can make an S5 suck. Crappy supercharged V6 in place of a direct-injection V8? Check. Automatic (DSG) transmission? You betcha. Two-tone seats because they didn’t have the courage to go full Havana Brown leather like I did? Uh-huh. I’m not even sure it has the upgraded stereo. Frankly, you’d be better off finding my original car and paying whatever the current owner wants for it.
It could be worse, however; it could be Signal Green.
Signal Green, of course, is the color used on the 997 GT3RS. Viper Green, also known as Lime Green, is the proper vintage green used on the 911s and 914s of the early ’70s. When I ordered my S5 back in 2008, the nice people at Audi went to Porsche to get the color information and I was very pleased at how closely the car matched the old-school Porkers. Relatively speaking, Viper/Lime has a lot of yellow in it, while Signal has a lot of blue. There was a real Signal Green fetish among the Audi fans a few years ago but I’m glad that’s over. It’s just not a nice color, and far more suited for a Shanghai parking garage after dark than for the open skies above Virginia International Raceway.
Feel free to refer to the above paragraph any time somebody wonders why you can’t get a brand-new car in any actual color nowadays. Nobody ever squabbles over precise shades of grey unless their autism has managed to acquire full and uncontested command of their speech and motor centers. The same goes for black and silver, the other two “colors” that are universally available on modern cars. Once you get off that clean monochrome track and deep into the weeds of actual hue and cry, so to speak, things get very complicated. If you offer Viper Green but the customer wants Lime Green, he’s unlikely to settle for Viper. Instead, he’ll just take Granite or Cloud or whatever you’re calling grey this afternoon — and just like that, you have another “vote” for the no-color palette.
Wikipedia offers a chart of PPG and DuPont’s most popular automotive “colors” for 2012, the most recent year for which there’s good data:
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A friend of mine had a beautiful emerald green - likely so-called candy apple green at the time - mid 60s Mustang that was a real looker. Another friend had an orange Road Runner which also looked mighty fine. The purple they used on the RRs was nice too. I've seen some great blues - deep, saphire or pearlescent blue. I've seen an import around my area recently with what I assume is a custom paint job. It's an iridescent blue/green/purple that is quite striking.
I have a Rebel Blue V60 Polestar and a white Golf R. Obviously, I'm half of the problem...