The share of white, black, gray, and silver cars grows on US roads. According to a new iSeeCars study, the grayscale colors adorn 78.9 percent of vehicles today, up from 78.6 in 2022 and 77.2 percent in 2018, and they’re not evenly distributed around the country.
White retains its top spot as the most popular car color. It adorns 26.2 percent of used cars in 2023. It was 23.3 percent in 2018. The share of black cars fell to 21.8 percent, while gray cars jumped from 15.2 percent five years ago to 19.2 percent today. The jump might have come at the expense of silver, which fell from 15.1 percent to 11.7 percent.
2023 Rank | Color | Share |
1 | White | 26.2% |
2 | Black | 21.8% |
3 | Gray | 19.2% |
4 | Silver | 11.7% |
5 | Blue | 9.7% |
6 | Red | 8.2% |
7 | Green | 1.0% |
8 | Brown | 0.8% |
9 | Orange | 0.6% |
10 | Beige | 0.4% |
11 | Purple | 0.2% |
12 | Gold | 0.2% |
13 | Yellow | 0.1% |
Blue and red swapped positions while remaining the most popular colors behind the grayscale shades. Blue is now the fifth most popular color at 9.8 percent, while red is sixth at 8.2. In 2018, the two colors accounted for 8.5 and 10.6 percent of the share of used cars, respectively.
The top six colors account for 96.8 percent of all vehicles, with green, brown, orange, beige, purple, gold, and yellow making up the rest. Green comes in at exactly 1.0 percent, while the other shades account for less than that. Beige increased by 0.1 percent, moving into the 10th position.
The study also broke down the share of colorful cars by state, with over a quarter of Alaska’s vehicles, 27.3 percent, being colorful. Blue is the most popular non-grayscale color in The Last Frontier state at 13.5 percent. West Virginia was second with 26.9 percent, followed by. Vermont at 25.8 percent, Wisconsin at 25.4 percent, and Maine at 25.3 percent.
Hawaii was the least colorful state, with 28.6 percent of its cars being white and only 16.3 percent being blue. That might be due to the high number of rental vehicles cruising around the popular tourist destination. California, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Utah ranked just above Hawaii.
iSeeCars compared over 10 million one- to five-year-old used vehicles sold in 2018 and 2023 to compile its data. The full results from the firm’s analysis are at the source link below.