#colors

Color counts when selling or buying a car. But which colors help or hurt? iSeeCars.com, a car search engine, performed exhaustive research on this topic, recently publishing the results.

True to form, Fiat Chrysler has attempted to keep the Chrysler 300 relevant by offering rolling paint and package options. With sales bottoming out at 29,213 U.S. deliveries in 2019, the model is likely not long for this world. However, that’s hardly a good reason for the manufacturer to abate the time-honored tradition of trying to seduce a few more customers through new upholstery and some distinctive badging — both of which will be available for purchase in 2020, in addition to the obligatory paint updates.

Chrysler’s sizable sedan also sees price increases nearly across the board. While you’ll hardly notice the difference on most rear-drive trims, all-wheel drive models tack on an additional $250-370 against last year’s pricing. Think of it as an opportunity to further sharpen your negotiating skills, something we imagine your local dealership will be expecting you to do anyway.

If you want the big discounts, try to find holdovers from the 2019 model year. If you want the latest appearances packages that’ll guarantee you have the freshest 300 from the factory, read on.

“You can have any color you want, so long as it’s white… or silver,” General Motors not so famously told this writer last summer, after a disheveled man walked through their doors in search of a bargain-basement ride.

Yours truly made the right choice, and it seems the rest of the world followed. White is by far the world’s most popular automotive paint color, topping a palette that shuns vividness and excitement with a passion. Thankfully, a color this writer loathes due to its overuse in the previous decade is still dropping, falling to its lowest point in more than a decade.

Back in September, the House of Elon decreed the Model 3 would be available in fewer colors, an apparent effort to streamline production of the company’s first high-production model. By restricting two of the seven hues – Obsidian Black and Metallic Silver – to special request status, it is arguable easier to move more machines out the factory (tent) door.

Now, option limitations are being applied to the megabuck Model S and X as well. Musk announced yesterday – via tweet, of course – that “many” interior configurations will not be available after the end of this month.

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.

If my personal relationship with Honda had a Facebook status, that status would be the one so beloved of mistresses, side pieces, and FWBs — namely, “It’s Complicated”. A decade ago, I took a gig reverse-engineering a piece of production-line equipment for them. I had never owned a Honda automobile at the time and I’d long since sold my first CB550. The car I drove to work at Honda was a black Volkswagen Phaeton.

Fast-forward to 2015. It’s been some time since I took the King’s shilling, so to speak, and the balance of payments between me and Ohio’s finest automaker is very far in my personal favor. But as I write this, I am the owner of four Hondas. And I’d buy another one, if they’d just quit screwing with me about the details.

I was recently driving down a street in my neighborhood and I saw, parked on the street, like everything was completely normal, a late-model Ford F-150 painted bright yellow. Bright. Yellow.

The person ultimately responsible for choosing colors for BMW cars, Sandy McGill, the other day attributed today’s popularity of white cars to the influence of Apple on consumers and designers.Prior to Apple, white was associated with things like refrigerators or the tiles in your bathroom. Apple made white valuable.McGill’s claims at first glance seem to be backed up by DuPont’s annual Color Popularity Report for 2011 that shows that 22% of new cars sold in the world were white, tied with silver. However, if you look at the historical data, white and lighter colors have been increasing in popularity for decades, long before Apple embraced white as their primary (no pun intended) design color.