2011 Automotive color popularity by DuPont

The popular annual car color popularity report for 2011 is here. It is coming every year from DuPont :

Europe (click on the picture to get hi-res version) :

In comparison to the 2010 charts no dramatic change, only minor. Europe is conservative. Unfortunately. DuPont changed a bit the the measurement, instead of 11 clolors in 2010 they measure 10.

Following table shows the differences :

Colour	% in 2011	% in 2010	% change
Black	25	24	1
White	20	14	5
Gray	18	19	-1
Silver	15	17	-2
Blue	7	9	-2
Red	6	7	-1
Brown / Beige	5	5	0
Green	1	1	0
Yellow Gold	1	1	0
Purple	n/a	1	n/a
Other	2	1	-1

The main difference is, that white color increased popularity at the expense of Gray, Silver and Blue. It is true, in every car dealership disregard the brand is at least one white car, if not the majority. I assume this chart are about new cars, e.g. side-effect of production planning.

I like black cars, but what is going on here ? The first four colors are basically black & white. Are the europeans more and more colour blind ?

Here is the global chart :

For more regions (13 together) follow this DuPont link, which is the source of this information.

Current Saab 9-3 Convertible Colours 2011

It looks like Saab is on the right track to skate out of the current crisis. The current 9-3 generation called Griffin contains also a convertible. The enthusiasts test can be found here. Let's look at the current colours Saab is offering at the moment. The screenshots have origin in the official international Saab configurator.

Arctic White

Black

Laser Red

Carbon Grey

Diamond Silver 

Glacier Silver

Java

Jet Black

Nocturne Blue

Oak Brown

These are the Aero builds. My favorites are Nocturne Blue, Oak Brown and Java. What are yours ?
You can play with the configurator starting here. 

Two things must be mentioned here:

The Independence Edition with special orange colour. Limited to 366 pieces. I don't know how many were ordered / sold, but they are still to buy on autoscout24.de (gasoline, diesel). The sticker "Sofort" (Immediately) means delivery, which seems they have them on stock.

And there will be soon after production restart a Sky Blue colour introduced.

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