Boredom drove me to find out what sorts of colours are available for cheapish cars in Brazil. Then I came back to Europe via Japan.
I started out thinking that because Brazil is full of warm and spontaneous people they would have a very lively palette of vehicle colours. Not so. No greens, no yellows and no oranges. And guess which company offers 12 exterior shades for their base model car? We’ll leave that to the end.
Chevrolet offers six colours for the Prisma, among them two blues, a red, a white a grey and a black. The Toyota (top) also offers six colours, among them one blue and more grey choice (wow).
Ford offer a nice clear blue and two reds, seven colours in all. They seem to have made a decent fist of the Fiesta saloon.
Citroen offer one red and all the rest of their colours are monochrome:
As ever, if you want to see something more interesting, go to Japan. I am beginning to develop an abiding fascination with this country. Here is the Nissan Note colour range:
That is quite remarkable. It looks like thirteen colours (still no green though).
Finally, we turn for comparison to the Bavarians who are offering this many colours on their shockingly cute 1-series two-door saloon:
Obviously this is a pretty cursory look at things but I do hope it gives a vague hint at the limited colour palettes now on offer. Even in what I expected was a more emotionally-led market (Brazil) there can be found little to thrill. And while BMW offers a good range in numerical terms, some of the shades would be indistinguishable in practice.
You could speculate that a stylish nation whose people are not afraid to be colourful in their own dress, would deliberately prefer muted colours as a backdrop. Stepping out of a blue/grey car into the Brazilian sunshine, your outfit will look far more remarkable than if you arrive in a metallic orange vehicle.
The Fifty Shades Of Dull that are offered by most manufacturers is saddening and, the bigger the car, the less likely you are to be offered, even, red, which seems the default choice when at least one ‘colour’ is offered on a model – for let’s be honest most the options offered are better described as coatings rather than colours.