“Whilst ruminating at red traffic lights recently, it dawned on me that there may have been a dastardly conspiracy over the last decade or so to drain the colour out of our National car fleet. Have you noticed most cars are black, white, or some sort of boring in-between shade of grey or silver? Where have all the colours gone? Who has decreed the National car fleet should be SO drab?” Stan L, Hackney, SA.
YOU’RE EXACTLY RIGHT ABOUT the almost monochromatic cars on our roads. One of my motoring journo colleagues is constantly bemoaning that people are so conservative in the colours they choose for their cars. But the reasoning is pretty simple: white, grey, black and silver are all colours almost immune to fashion or fads, and people have been conditioned to worry about how easy their cars will be to sell when the time comes. I’m sure many of you remember the ‘orrible eighties (and before) when some truly hideous colours were on offer. Lone o’Ranger, anyone? Plum Crazy. Strike Me Pink. I think I may even have been responsible for one of those silly names way back when I was working on the GM-H account for George Patterson.
Even when the re-born Monaro appeared in 2001, some of the more outrageous colours proved unpopular (in particular, the green called Hothouse, and even the reds – Red Hot, or the insipid Flame – weren’t hugely popular) and the biggest selling colour was the unimaginative Delft Mica blue (a colour also available on more run-of-the-mill sedans). I wanted to buy a yellow one (Devil) but the plain black interior (all the others had colour-keyed interiors) put me off so I ended up buying a (yes, you guessed it) blue one.
My own thinking is that some of the current colours (the grey primer shade, for example, that looks like it was taken straight from a 1960 base model Ford Falcon) may not be that easy to sell in three or four years’ time.
I love the story told to me by Maserati. Apparently one buyer decided he wanted each corner of the car to be a different colour (possibly a bit like that hideous anniversary Mazda MX-5) and because they could easily produce bespoke cars, they did it to his specifications, even though they pointed out that no subsequent buyer would ever accept a multi-hued Maser. Apparently, when he came to trade it in, the dealer had to have the whole car resprayed … wouldn’t have done his trade-in valuation much good.
The current dull grey reminds me of Hillman Minx Specials from about 1960 which also came in a similar grey, or white, a dull blue, or green. Following from the bright two-tone Gay Look of a few years earlier, the Specials must have reflected a mini depression about that time. Colours recovered a bit after that and I owned a white over yellow Minx deluxe station wagon which was later swapped for a forest green Hillman Imp before I broadened my horizons into BMC, Ford, Holden and Datsun products in various colours. My main complaint with modern cars is not so much the exterior colour, but the universal hideous, monotonous, hot black interiors imposed upon us. Why can’t we have upholstery choices as in the past? My Morris 1100 and Kingswood had green interiors, others were either red, brown, blue or pale grey. I was lucky enough to pick up a nice clean low mileage Mazda Tribute last year in strato blue with a light grey inside – what an improvement over my silver MG and white Honda, both of which have monotone black interiors!