We Brits are known for having a good old whinge about the grey weather – we’d say this was especially during the winter but hey, it’s Britain so it could be anytime – but there’s nothing stopping us loving the colour for our cars.
In fact, grey has topped the list of our favourite car colours for the fifth year running, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).
It’s not all black and white… or is it?
The latest SMMT figures for new car buying in 2022 show that most of the new cars hitting the road (25.7%) were grey. That’s more than 408,000 grey motors rolling out of the forecourts.
But the monochrome vibe doesn’t end there – second and third place in the most popular car colours are black and white respectively, with 20.1% of the market keeping it classic in black and 16.7% going all white.
And when you add in the 6.1% of new cars that were adorned with a shimmering silver exterior (and if our maths doesn’t let us down), that’s a huge 68.6% of the UK’s new car fleet that’s in greyscale.
Feeling blue or seeing red?
Sounds like our cars are as ‘meh’ as our weather (a lot of the time) so what about the vibrancy, people?
Well, there’s good news to be had in Scotland – blue is now the most popular colour in the land of the brave. In the UK, blue cars now make up 16% of new passenger vehicles, making it the fourth-most popular colour on the list. This is despite the proportion of blue vehicles being registered seeing a slight reduction (1%) when compared with 2021.
One colour looking like it might be on the way out is red – sales have slipped by 0.3% year-on-year, following a larger 1.4% drop in 2021. Saying that, the SMMT figures show red is still the UK's fifth most popular choice, with the most popular model in this colour being the UK’s best-selling car overall, the Nissan Qashqai.
It’s not easy being a green car
The old superstition about green cars being unlucky might be starting to fade as sales of green cars saw a huge jump in 2022, placing seventh in the list of the top 10 colours – that’s a 74.2% leap in popularity year-on-year.
Car manufacturers seem to favour the green shades on their production line to be either very dark like Mini’s British Racing green, or very pale like Ford’s Bohai Bay Mint.
What about the other colours?
2022 has seen more unusual colours such as orange, yellow, bronze and turquoise being chosen more often than they were in 2021, but fear not grey fans - they’re a long way off overtaking the monochromatic shades – these colours only account for 3.4% of the whole new car market.
