Friday 24th May 2002

Colour Your Judgement

The car in front is blue

---

[mondieu]

Surely the typical car now is a silver ford, probably a focus or mondeo?

[Bodo]

The statistics for Germany:

Registrated new cars in 2001:

grey (silver)____1 284 795
blue____________751 986
black____________661 855
green___________255 721
red_____________193 957
white___________116 983
others____________76 421

[plotloss]

67.8% of all Mercs sold worldwide are specced in Silver. Its because of the Mclaren apparently...

Matt.

[james]

I noticed the other day (while sitting in traffic on the A4) that the current choice of car colours seems to be particularly conservative. Very dull colours indeed.

James (with one of the few non silver Mercedes on the road)

[Cotty]

quote:
67.8% of all Mercs sold worldwide are specced in Silver. Its because of the Mclaren apparently...

Matt.

You have to wonder how much of that is personal choice or people worried about resale value if they bought say a red one.
Paul

[kingjohn]

quote:
67.8% of all Mercs sold worldwide are specced in Silver. Its because of the Mclaren apparently...

Matt.

Surely it's bugger all to do with Mclaren as Mercs have been silver for a long long time. I would have thought it was due to the old racing colours of years ago, you know silver Mercs, red Ferraris, green Jaguars, blue Fiats etc.

I know there were a lot of brown/gold Mercs made in the 80's but there have always been silver ones around and they just make a lot more now than they did then.

John

[gnomesmith]

I would have thought it was due to the old racing colours of years ago, you know silver Mercs, red Ferraris, green Jaguars, blue Fiats etc.

---

Blue Fiats, I thought they came from Italy not France.

[kingjohn]

Oooops!

[McNab]

Germany's 'official' racing colour was white.

Gosh, what it is to be clever!

But then maybe I'm wrong...

[Bodo]

quote:
Germany's 'official' racing colour was white.

Gosh, what it is to be clever!

But then maybe I'm wrong...

This is right. Silver was seen first, when Mercedes-Benz created the 'Silberpfeil' [silver arrow] by scrubbing off the paint.

www.daimlerchrysler.de/classic/newsroom/caracciola/index_e.html
says:

quote:
In scrutineering for the 1934 international Eifel race on the Nürburgring, the W 25 proved to be one kilogram too heavy. The paint was scraped off, bringing the weight down to the specified limit, and the "Silver Arrow" was born. From then on, German racing cars appeared in silver rather than white livery.

BTW:
Belgian cars were yellow,
Swiss cars were white with red stripe across,
US cars were blue/white white/blue with stripe along


bodo

[Steve Harrison]

Thee was a popular urban myth (or was it?, you law enforcement chaps might know) that red cars were more likely to get pulled because bored traffic coppers used to play motor snooker, nicking a red then a colour and trying to score more points than their colleagues. If this were the case then black would be a pretty bad colour as well and yellow the best I suppose.

There was also a superstition about green cars being unlucky. I'm sure someone told me that green cars were most likely to be involved in accidents in rural areas they blended into the leafy background and were more difficult to see.

[JohnL]

I thought green was unlucky because it was the British racing colour and they kept crashing - was it the drivers, the engineering, the manufacture, the maintenance? No it was the colour which was obviously unlucky

(With apologies to anyone who's raced a green car )

>> Edited by JohnL on Monday 27th May 11:29