This is not as detailed as the data released by DuPont in their charts but can serve as a good reference. DuPont had the data down to a breakup for India as well. This is not available in the PPG press release.

Silver is still the [...]]]> PPG has released their findings on color popularity for 2009.

This is not as detailed as the data released by DuPont in their charts but can serve as a good reference. DuPont had the data down to a breakup for India as well. This is not available in the PPG press release.

Silver is still the most popular color the world over.  Here is a summary of the breakup for Asia Pacific, North America and Europe. (Click on the chart image below for a larger version)

2009-PPG Popular Vehicle Colors

Read the details of the PPG press release source here.

Here is my older post with data from 2000-2008 from the DuPont studies.

Car themed movies are my favourite type. I have extended it into movies with really good car chase scenes. I have been carrying a list of around 60 movies to add to my existing collection for the past 2 years and adding them slowly [...]]]>

Eleanor the star of Gone in Sixty Seconds

Car themed movies are my favourite type. I have extended it into movies with really good car chase scenes. I have been carrying a list of around 60 movies to add to my existing collection for the past 2 years and adding them slowly one at a time when I find them. These are Hollywood movies in English and range from 1900 till 2009. I still have not built up a non-English collection (just noticed that there seems to be a good number of Japanese and French movies that fit the car theme). This weekend, I delved a bit deeper into the data of movies available and tried grouping them into categories and also sorted them by year. In the process my list of 60 suddenly became 135. I have added this list as a free pdf download. As of now, I own around 30 movies that I call car themed movies. If you have to ask who Eleanor, Bumblebee, Herbie, The Judge and General Lee are you should probably stop here and decide if you want to read the remaining.

The current decade (2000′s) seems to have the maximum number of car themed movies  and movies with car chases occupying key parts of the storyline.The next closest decade was the 70′s. We are indeed in car-crazy times . The 80′s and 90′s didnt seem to be that into cars, did they ?

The movies can be grouped into racing movies(including all forms of racing like NASCAR,Champ car, Drag strip, street racing, illegal racing), chase movies (car chases and crashes), Bio-pics(about famous racing legends), Horror , Drama (deeper story around car theme) and also finally about driving( typically high speed driving, stunts, long distance, getaways). Chases in movies comprise close to 35% of movies on my list and Race themed movies comprise 46% of the list. Interestingly the percentage of movies having critically acclaimed chase scenes in the 70s was around 18% and race themed movies at 76%.In the last 9 years the ratio is 57% chase scenes and 28% on race themed. The ratio has turned 180 degrees around in 30 years !

The earliest car themed movie I could find was the 1913 movie -Speed Kings, based on automobile racing. If there is anything earlier than that please let me know. There was a movie called Speed in 1935 that was also based on auto racing which was pretty popular then.

All time popular cars and movies they appeared in:

• The Bond movie Goldfinger (1964) was the first movie the Ford Mustang appeared in (it was launched in 1964 as well). Also this was the first movie the Bond car was set as the Aston Martin DB5. The same car now owned by Spielberg appears in 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can.
• The Herbie Series is probably the most loved series with the VW Beetle Show up in 5 movies from 1968 till 2005.
• The DeLorean in the Back to the Future series shows up in 3 movies from 19855 to 1990.
• The Mustang Fastback “Eleanor” shows up in two movies of the same name Gone in Sixty Seconds from 1974 & 2000. The second GISS movie seems to be the first of many car themed movies that were released after 2000.
• Ford Mustang:  Bullit(1986),Gone in 60 Seconds(1974),Gone in 60 Seconds(2000),Fast & Furious Tokyo Drift(2006), I Am Legend( 2007), Death Race (2008)
• Mini Cooper: Italian Job(1969),Italian Job(2001) & Bourne Identity(2002).
• Ford Gran Torino: Charlies Angels : Fullthrottle (2004) , Starsky & Hutch (2004) and Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino (2009), Fast and Furious (2009) has a 1972 Gran Torino Sport.
• Pontiac GTO:  Two Lane Blacktop(1971),Bullit(1986), XXX(2002). The Last Ride(2004) a TV movie featured the GTO “Judge” and also had the latest iteration of the Pontiac GTO.
• Chevrolet Corvette: 1970 Corvetter in Death Race 2000(1973), 1973 Stingray in Corvette Summer (1978)
• Chevrolet Camaro:  Transformers (2007) had the 1977 and 2009 Camaros, 2 Fast 2 Furious(2003) had a 1969 Camaro, 2009 Fast and Furious has a 1973 Camaro.
• Dodge Charger: Dirty Mary Crazy Larry(1974),The Fast and the Furious (2001),Dukes of Hazzard(2005) – “The General Lee”
•  Dodge Challenger: Vanishing Point(1971), 2 Fast 2 Furious(2003)
• Scary Cars: Modified 1971 Lincoln Continental in The Car(1977), 1958 Plymouth Fury in Christine(1983) , 1954 Buick Roadmaster in From a Buick 8(Upcoming movie for 2009). 
   

• Upcoming Car Themed movies for 2009 and beyond are:
  • From a Buick 8 ( Horror movie based on a scarily good Stephen King book expected in 2009)
  • Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen (The transformers sequel expected around June 2009)
  • Cars II (The sequel to Pixar Cars expected in 2012)
  • The Limit( A movie on Grand Prix racing with Toby Maguire expected in 2012)

   (Do check up on www.carsplusmovies.com for more updates. Its a great site with tonnes of car movie related links. I got the above list from there.)

  Download: You can download my list of movies as a free PDF file download. Do take a look and let me know if you come across any good car themed movie I may have missed from the list. Also do pass on the pdf to your friends who may be interested.

   

   

DuPont  releases data on vehicle color popularity for major markets across the world and in 2008 have included India data separately. I hope it will be tracked going forward as well.  Here is the DuPont report for 2008. Lots of interesting data point there including variants on core color types, finishing, textures [...]]]>

DuPont  releases data on vehicle color popularity for major markets across the world and in 2008 have included India data separately. I hope it will be tracked going forward as well.  Here is the DuPont report for 2008. Lots of interesting data point there including variants on core color types, finishing, textures etc. While mentioning the textures something very interesting is Chrome finish paint. An example is seen here.

They have been tracking such data for US, Europe and Japan for close to ten years now. Though they haven’t given it in one single chart – Zimbly Cars spent the time to collate it from data made public by DuPont.  Here is the trend for the past 8 years. 

**2001 – I wasn’t able to find data for this year on the net – if anyone has it or knows someone in DuPont please let me know.

The most popular colors over the past 8 years for cars are White, Silver, Black and Blue. These have been fairly consistent and have not lost their charm over time.

Red has been a consistent color with no changes in popularity since 2004. Grey has been steadily increasing in popularity since 2004 and may be a serious contender to Black.

Black though considered a timeless color went through a small dip in popularity between 2002 and 2005 but has been increasing in popularity since 2005.

The Indian Buyer chose to stay conservative in car color selection and mainly stuck to White and Silver for over half the vehicles purchased in 2008. (No wonder it is difficult to find white or silver cars in parking lots.)  The remainder was made up by the other colors as seen in this graph below.

Following are the trends for other major regions.

An interesting post I came across while researching this post was one talking about the meanings of colors in general and in meanings in various parts of the world: http://www.bizzia.com/brandcurve/color-theory-primer-part-7-color-meanings/.

I associate the following meanings with common vehicle colors in India:

Black: Aggression, closed, secretive (a lot of SUVs are in this color). Best suited for large vehicles – looks a bit out of place on small cars. One of the most difficult to maintain colors as scratches on black show up as white and look very bad. Dust and dirt dull the shine very quickly.

White: Purity, honesty, dishonesty, politics (most cars/SUVs owned by Politicos are in this color). It was a very popular color in the 80s and 90s and is making a comeback. A color that seems to suit most vehicles regardless of size. Fairly easy to maintain – but splashed with mud looks pretty bad. A color that seems to have a slightly negative association for certain models because of being typical cabbie vehicles. Examples include the Indica, Tavera, Sumo, Ambassador, Omni. Very few private buyers would buy these models in white – since they don’t want to be called cabbies by their friends.

Gold:  The metal that most Indians want to own and wear. There is a significant amount of gold/champagne colored vehicles. A color that I personally feel doesn’t suit many vehicles. Also an easy to maintain color.

Silver:  A very techie color (most vehicles owned by techies are in this color). A color considered very serious and classy – a very aspirational color. One of the easiest colors to maintain. I used to own two cars which were silver in color and both would still look good even if they were dirty. Manufacturers poor people are forced to sell cars in silver due to the demand. I remember in 2001 or 2002 Honda removed silver from their sales catalogue for the Civic in the USA because the previous year most Civics sold were in silver.

Green: Fertility, money, a color associated to religion.  Dark greens seems to be fairly well accepted but some bright greens do hurt peoples eyes. The parrot green Santro is the only example I can think of.

Blue: Water, Oceans, calmness. This color has a wide variety of tones available that make it appeal to a wide audience – but doesn’t have the same magnetism of a red or yellow. This color is a guaranteed color in most manufacturer color palettes year on year.

Yellow: Associated to being bright and sunny – but again a color that isn’t offered by many manufacturers. Maruti is probably the only one that dared to sell yellow cars. Looks good on smaller cars – I haven’t seen a yellow SUV till now – I hope I don’t have to.

Red:  Anger, speed. A color best suited for sports cars, sporty cars and hatchbacks. Red is to be avoided on large SUVS since they look like huge tomatoes. Mahindra and Tata sell their Scorpio and Safari in red and people still buy it! Some variant of red is usually available at almost each manufacturer.

Purple: Originally associated with royalty – now considered an offbeat color that has guaranteed very poor resale value of the vehicle since very few people like the color purple. Very minimal choice when it comes to buying cars in this color. I can think of only the Fords, Marutis coming in this color.

Earth/brown:  A very simple and bland color which is easy to maintain if it is “light brown”. Dark brown is a rare color which again isn’t very popular. Mostly sold by Hyundai and Mahindra. Some Tata vehicles as well.

What are my favourite colors ? So far I have owned 1 car in blue, 2 cars in silver and 1 in red. I hope my next car whenever I get one will be in black. I like the pearl white color as well and may seriously look at that as well.

What are your favourite colors for cars and what will be your next cars color ? Do let me know.

Updated April 3: Results of the Nano Poll so far:

Looks like there will be a lot of Re or Gold colored Nanos on the road as they seem to be the most popular colors so far.