Car color popularity and trends

Sometimes I go to car dealers just for looking at cars and last months I see so much white color. Also a recent visit at 2 Saab dealers was not an exception. So I started to think and search why exactly white and what is happening.

DuPont releases from time to time an automotive popularity color study, here you can find it for the year 2010. For Europe (relevant to me) it looks like this :

It doesn't look after too much white, isn't it ? I don't know how big is the marketshare of DuPont in the car color shipments. But since this is a third biggest chemical company worldwide with 60.000 employees, these data have relevance and show a big chunk of the colours of new cars.

Now look what happened at the Geneva Motor Show 2011 which was that important for Saab with introductions of PhoeniX concept, the IQon system, the Saab 9-3 Independence Edition, the whole 9-3 Griffin line and Saab 9-5 Sport Combi.

                                                             (a high resolution picture can be found here)

The first five colors are more or less the same but the customer demand is switching to white and in general to lighter colors, the car manufacturers are reflecting this. Is this a real customer requirements trend showed in some data or does someone tries to dictate the trend ? No clue.

Does Saab follow this trend ? Absolutely. Here are the colors for 2011 :

These are the colours available in Germany on the 9-3 Griffin. You can see white, black, grey, blue (Nr.6). No green (which is my favorite color), no light blue and only one red color shade. On the convertible a yellow shade would be nice. But anyway, to put this in perspective, the first two pictures show, why the actual Saab colors on the third picture are as they are.

sources : saabsunited.com, autoblog.com, saablog.net, saabim blog