The late Henry Ford famously said a customer could have any color of car they want, as long as it’s black — and it just so happens that black is the most popular vehicle color in the D.C. area.
“One thing about black is that it is associated with luxury. And also, black is a color that people don’t get sick of,” Julie Blackley of new and used car search site iSeeCars.com told WTOP.
Almost a quarter of all vehicles on the roads around the District — 24% — are black. Vehicles in grayscale colors — blacks, grays and silvers — outsell all others, accounting for 70% of all vehicles.
“When you go to auto showrooms, these colors are more prevalent, and automakers make more of these vehicles. It is kind of like the chicken-and-egg approach,” Blackley said. “They make more of these vehicles because they are more popular.”
Gray and silver are the third- and fourth-most popular colors, at 17.7% and 14.3% of vehicles on the road, respectively, but the second-most popular color, behind black, is white, at 20.3% of all vehicles.
Bright colors do occasionally catch on, and that is good for older vehicles that are a newly popular color.
“Car colors like orange, are making a comeback. If you look for orange vehicles, you’ll see that there are orange pickups and SUVs out there. And because that color is so rare, they tend to do well in the resale market,” Blackley said.
iSeeCars used its database to examine 9.4 million vehicles on the road across the nation to determine the most popular colors by region.
Here’s how colors rank by percentage of vehicles in the D.C. market, according to iSeeCars:
- Black, 24.0%
- White, 20.3%
- Gray, 17.7%
- Silver, 14.3%
- Blue, 10.2%
- Red, 9.2%
- Brown, 1.6%
- Green, 0.9%
- Beige, 0.6%
- Orange, 0.4%
