What ever happened to brightly coloured cars?

[Tim bo]

Dog Star said:

I had an E coupe in that colour.....
Looked amazing in sun

.. and speaking of blue E-Class coupés, I've been eyeing up the E53 recently.

The newly facelifted E53 has a new paint option, designo brilliant blue magno. It's one of these matt paints which you normally see in grey and which I am not normally a fan of, but it does look good in blue on the configurator.

Shown here next to the standard metallic Brilliant Blue for comparison.

Designo Blue Magno



Metallic

Edited by Tim bo on Friday 4th September 11:01

[aeropilot]

Pericoloso said:

there is a Cayenne or Macan I see locally in orange though ,will try and get a pic if I ever see it parked .

Probably a Cayenne Coupe, as its a standard extra cost option on those, but not available as a standard colour on the normal Cayenne or the Macan. Miami Blue and Mamba Green are options on the Macan though.

[TheDrBrian]

tedman said:

Not quite in line with people’s yellow Porsche’s, but I happily paid the extra £850 option for Soul Red Crystal on my Mazda6.



I used a stock photo - don’t have any nice ones of my car!

Soul Red is that good it sold my dad a Mazda3.

[kambites]

Wacky Racer said:

I saw a Polo Harlequin a few weeks ago in Bulgaria.

[Pericoloso]

aeropilot said:

Pericoloso said:

there is a Cayenne or Macan I see locally in orange though ,will try and get a pic if I ever see it parked .

Probably a Cayenne Coupe, as its a standard extra cost option on those, but not available as a standard colour on the normal Cayenne or the Macan. Miami Blue and Mamba Green are options on the Macan though.

I think ,you're right about it being a Coupe ,I'm not very au fait with the Macans and Cayenne models .

[OMITN]

As I was on the motorway yesterday for only about the 10th time in I-can’t-remember-how-long, I was having exactly this thought. Traffic on the M6 isn’t yet at “sea” levels, but the only colours out there were regulation black for BMWs, regulation grey/silver for Audi’s and every shade of boredom in between for everyone else.

In my defence, I was driving my wife’s “soul” red Mazda CX-5. Just as well, as after my lovely metallic red Cupra was pinched last year, I’ve been knocking around in a shedtastic 307 in...black

As I ponder what I buy next that might be interesting, one of the criteria has to be some sort of positive colour.

[RobM77]

For me at least, it's about being discreet and blending in. This particularly applies to performance cars that you want to drive briskly sometimes. This has become more and more prevalent as road rage has become more of an issue over time.

[SidewaysSi]

RobM77 said:

For me at least, it's about being discreet and blending in. This particularly applies to performance cars that you want to drive briskly sometimes. This has become more and more prevalent as road rage has become more of an issue over time.

Totally agree. If it's something like a Caterham, a bright colour is fine as most people won't envy you. But in anything remotely expensive/desirable, I prefer something more subtle.

My old Cayman GT4 was in bright red. Nothing too OTT but I did feel a bit on display and some of the attitudes from the general public wasn't worth it.

To enjoy and truly use niceish cars, I go for something subtle so the next GT car will probably be black, grey or silver!

[lukeharding]

Paul_M3 said:

To be honest, when I was looking for my car I was thinking white or black. Luckily the perfect spec came up in red, and once I saw it in the metal I was sold. I must admit that it is actually quite nice not having a silver or black car for a change.

That looks perfect, and the duck tail really finishes it off.

[RobM77]

SidewaysSi said:

RobM77 said:

For me at least, it's about being discreet and blending in. This particularly applies to performance cars that you want to drive briskly sometimes. This has become more and more prevalent as road rage has become more of an issue over time.

Totally agree. If it's something like a Caterham, a bright colour is fine as most people won't envy you. But in anything remotely expensive/desirable, I prefer something more subtle.

My old Cayman GT4 was in bright red. Nothing too OTT but I did feel a bit on display and some of the attitudes from the general public wasn't worth it.

To enjoy and truly use niceish cars, I go for something subtle so the next GT car will probably be black, grey or silver!

When I was 21 I had a Celica Carlos Sainz in red. I had a few road rage incidents directed at me, one pretty nasty, and from listening to their red faced rants it quickly became apparent they thought the only reason to buy such a car was to show off. My next car was an MR2 in dark blue and I didn't have one single incident. And yes, my first Caterham arrived a few years later and that was viper blue with silver bonnet stripes, so quite noticeable, but everyone just thought I was a beardy guy in a kit car and left me alone. From owning different cars and driving different hire cars over the years a pattern slowly emerged. People don't understand our love of cars - they think fast cars are purely for going fast or for showing off and that's it. If you don't want any trouble, you therefore need to drive at a sensible speed and buy a car that's in a discreet colour and spec. For me that doesn't impact my enjoyment of cars at all, but what it does do is get these idiots off my back.

[SRT77]

You can't beat a bit of Liquid Yellow. The downside is that it's not exactly under the radar.

[RobM77]

Tim bo said:

Dog Star said:

Tim bo said:

Mercedes AMG are particularly monochrome.

C63 AMG can be specced in three different shades of grey, three different shades of silver, 2 types of black, 2 types of white, and blue.

I went for blue.

I had an E coupe in that colour.....
Looked amazing in sun

Aye Mercedes Brilliant Blue.

Agreed - looks fab in the sun. That E-Class looks excellent

Edited by Tim bo on Friday 4th September 10:48

My FRenault was a similar colour. I had the car rebuilt when I bought it, so got to choose. My particular colour was VW Lapis Blue, the launch colour for the Golf R:



A bit reminiscent of my Elise's blue too - called "Atlantic Blue":

[EJH]

Blakewater said:

With premium brands, you can have any colour you like inside and out if you pay enough. The interesting options lie in the expensive upgrade packages.

Audi has Audi Exclusive.
https://www.audi.com/en/experience-audi/models-and...
You can even go to a special showroom and look at paint, leather, steering wheel and alloy wheel samples.
https://www.audi.de/de/foren/en/audi-forum-neckars...

BMW has BMW Individual
https://discover.bmw.co.uk/iframes/individual-visu...

Mercedes Benz has Designo, though doesn't seem to offer the options it once did. It used to offer colour changing paint and granite trim.
https://www.mercedes-benz.co.uk/passengercars/merc...

Porsche has Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur
https://www.porsche.com/uk/accessoriesandservice/e...

Jaguar Land Rover has Special Vehicle Operations and still do colour changing Spectral paint. I regularly see a Range Rover around with colour changing paint.
https://www.jaguar.co.uk/about-jaguar/special-vehi...

I'm overjoyed that some manufacturers offer flexibility to order bespoke colours but it's not that easy. In the case of BMW, only German built cars can be had in individual and then it's at a cost of £4,550 (so no Dakar Yellow M2CPs).

It's not that easy with Porsche, either as it depends on when they're doing batches of cars and it's increasingly difficult to get in the UK (I believe it has been impossible on the last few rounds of GT cars and those RHD cars in PTS colours have been for other markets like Hong Kong).

I have a car on order and asked if it was possible to have Rubystone / Rubystar and, unfortunately, it wasn't so I have chosen red from the available options.



The range of standard colours looks to be getting narrower still from most manufacturers; the below is an example of BMW's offerings in the UK for the 3 series:

SE / Sport Models:



M Sport Models:



M-ish (340i/d) Models:

[Jawls]

Some great bright colours in this thread. Love the Boxster in lava orange.

My old Audi was in boring Daytona grey, but when upgrading to my Cayman I knew I wanted an exciting colour. But vast majority of second hand market seems to me black, white, silver. Barely any racing yellow out there.

Anywho, opted for amaranth red


Do like the bright orange Focus RS’ you used to see as well.

[Justin Case]

Wacky Racer said:

In my mis-spent youth I had a half-share in a Hillman Minx that looked very much like this as the various rotten panels were replaced with ones from scrapyards

Did these Polos come in a complete set so that all the different combinations of panels were used up?

Edited by Justin Case on Friday 4th September 14:49

[bad company]

Red for me, owned from new:-

[E63eeeeee...]

I love seeing bright cars but don't buy them. Our drive has three in actual silver, and the Merc in that special extra-boring grey which looks completely different every time you see it and is (or should be) called Is-that-really-my-car-it-looked-different-when-I-parked-it Grey. I thought it was silver when I ordered it.

I've always preferred boring looking cars, never wanted to stand out, and I've only recently finally bought a car mainly because of how it looked.

Strangely, I wear a lot of bright coloured clothes. No idea how my head works sometimes.

[lukeharding]

E63eeeeee... said:

I love seeing bright cars but don't buy them. Our drive has three in actual silver, and the Merc in that special extra-boring grey which looks completely different every time you see it and is (or should be) called Is-that-really-my-car-it-looked-different-when-I-parked-it Grey. I thought it was silver when I ordered it.

I've always preferred boring looking cars, never wanted to stand out, and I've only recently finally bought a car mainly because of how it looked.

Strangely, I wear a lot of bright coloured clothes. No idea how my head works sometimes.

With brightly coloured cars, I tend to work on the basis that they see the car, but don't really pay attention to the driver.

[Sensei Rob]

The annoying thing is, even when you choose a colour, the shade of blue, red, green etc. Is the most grey shade of colour they can find. It's like they turned the saturation slider all the way down.

[irocfan]

I'm hoping that the replacement (next year or 2) for the Camaro is going to be Plum Crazy or Sub-Lime