Brits favour 3 shades of grey
THERE ARE ABOUT 30 MILLION CARS ON UK ROADS, BUT WHAT’S THE MOST COMMON COLOUR?
An unlikely contender has made it into the list of Britain’s 10 most popular new car colours — brown.
The Royal Automobile Club ( RAC) has been finding out which tones are on the up and which ones are going out of fashion.
Using information collected by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency ( DVLA) at the end of the first quarter of 2016, here’s a rundown of the nation’s most selected car shades. 10. Brown A common colour choice of the 1970s, brown is increasing in popularity.
Of Britain’s 30,459,456 licensed cars, 169,656 are mud- coloured. That represents just 0.6 per cent of vehicles but there’s certainly a brown rejuvenation when you compare stats to three years ago — in the first quarter of 2013, 92,226 brown vehicles were on the road. 9. Yellow Yellow is declining as a colour choice. There were 172,297 suntoned vehicles on the road at the end of the first quarter of 2016. That is 3 per cent fewer than in the same period of 2013. 8. Beige/ buff Beige is a non- mover, with 235,683 drivers opting for what is a traditionally bland- but- can- flattera- car colour. Beige is the only colour in the top 10 that’s remained static. 7. Green Carmakers are diversifying their leafy options. Pastel shades are common on super- small models and even supercar builders are seeing a spike in green car sales. But green vehicle make up just 3.5 per cent of all motor shades in 2016 with 1,066,496 on the road — 466,563 fewer than in 2013. 6. White Many have linked the increase of white car sales to the “Apple Effect”, where people match their car to their smartphones and other technology devices. DVLA says 2,833,084 ( 9.3 per cent) of the country’s cars are white. That’s up by 91 per cent since 2013. 5. Red It wasn’t all that long ago that red was one of the three most popular car colours in the country but, with the emergence of white as a popular car colour, many brands now offer red as their flat- tone, nocost option.
Still, 10.6 per cent of all cars in the country are rouge, which is a 4 per cent increase on the first quarter of 2013. In total, there are 3,237,326 red cars. 4. Grey German brands such as BMWand Mercedes- Benz can account for the spike in grey cars. There were 3,710,965 grey vehicles on the road at the end of March this year, an increase of 21 per cent on the 3,074,210 at the end of the same month in 2013. Grey makes up 12.2 per cent of all vehicle colours. 3. Blue The DVLA says Britain’s drivers owned 5 per cent fewer blue cars by the end of the first quarter of this year compared with the same time three years ago.
Still, 5,689,516 blue cars make up 18.7 per cent of all vehicles. 2. Black Back in 2010, black was the most popular new car colour. But it’s been superseded with white for the past three years. That said, black is still more common on the roads than white.
Nearly one in five cars are black; 5,915,527 black vehicles were counted at the end of the first quarter of 2016, which is up 13 per cent on three years ago. 1. Silver/ aluminium So here it is, the silver lining — the most metallic tone is also the most selected in Britain.
There are 6,841,315 registered silver cars, making up 22.5 per cent of all vehicles on the road — that’s 925,788 more than black cars.
But despite silver leading the colour charts, it’s in decline.
Compared with 2013 figures, there are 7 per cent fewer metallooking models in the country at the moment. Brown cars such as this Austin Princess from the 1970s are making a comeback.