Top car colors for 2024? 'Colorful cars appear to be an endangered species'

Grays of various shades — white, black and gray itself — are dominant in the automotive colors landscape now, while cars that are deemed “colorful” — blues and reds, golds and browns — continue to plummet in popularity, according to a recent data analysis by ISeeCars.com.

The upward shift in grayscale shades is fairly dramatic, with the survey showing that those innocuous colors combined now have a market share of 78.5%, compared to 60% in 2004. iSeeCars analyzed the colors of more than 20 million used cars from model years 2004 to 2023.

Among these dominant shades, gray made the biggest move up over 20 years, gaining 9.7% in market share. In the past year alone, gray gained 3.5% of market share over 2022's numbers, even as black, white and silver lost a bit. This may be because more automakers are offering a wider variety of interesting grays.

White remains the most popular color today, gaining 12.5% of market share since 2004, followed by black, gaining 8% of the market. Silver, however, has seen a big drop in that time — losing 13.5% of the market.

Among the “rainbow” colors, the most dramatic drops were for gold, purple, brown, beige and yellow.

“Colorful cars appear to be an endangered species,” said Karl Brauer, iSeeCars executive analyst. “Despite a diverse palette being offered by automakers, there are far fewer non-grayscale cars sold today. They’ve lost half their market share over the past 20 years, and they could become even rarer in another 20 years.”

The report’s findings, he notes, lead to the regrettable conclusion — for automotive enthusiasts, at least — that today’s roads reflect “the undeniable dilution of our car color spectrum.”