White is still the number one car colour

As a leader in automotive colour, NEXA AUTOCOLOR^® keeps a close eye on consumer tastes and emerging trends. Every year we gather data from around the world to discover which shades were the most popular for new vehicles. Here we summarise our findings for the 2019 model year.                                                                                                                                            

Global trends

Our global colour trend popularity study showed that white is still the most popular car colour, accounting for 35 percent of 2019 model year vehicles. Black holds onto second place with 18 percent.

However, ‘it’s not all black and white,’ as the percentage of new cars painted white has actually decreased by 4 percent worldwide since the 2018 model year. This could indicate that white is gradually becoming less popular.

There was no change in the popularity of grey, blue/red, natural and green. In fact, silver was the only colour that increased in popularity, by 5 percent globally.                                                 

European trends

In Europe, white wins again, although by a smaller margin of 26 percent – a decrease of 6 percent compared to last year’s data. Grey (22 percent) has overtaken black (19 percent) as the second most popular car colour.

Country trends

Nobody can accuse every country in Europe as being the same. This is also true of colour choice. White dominated in Eastern and Western European countries (29 percent and 28 percent respectively), while grey was number one in Italy (31 percent) and Spain (25.5 percent).

Analysing the data by country also indicates that white’s dominance could be fading. In France, there was just 1 percent separating white (24 percent) and grey (23 percent) as the first and second most popular car colours. There was no clear favourite in the United Kingdom with white and grey both taking the top spot with 20 percent, while black was number one in Germany with 27 percent of 2019 model year vehicles painted this colour.

Finally, blue was on average the most favoured non-achromatic (white, black, grey and silver) colour. Blue was more popular than silver in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Western Europe.

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