TORONTO - Take a quick look around your neighbourhood and nearby highways, and you probably won't be surprised by the observations of the lead exterior paint designer at General Motors.
White is the favourite car colour across North America, while black, silver and grey fill out the top four -- followed by blue, and then red, according to Michelle Killen.
"Colour is so personal to your customer," Killen, who is based in Michigan, said during a visit this week to the Canadian International Auto Show.
"When a customer walks onto a lot and they don't see a colour that catches their eye, a lot of time that's a lost sale. So we really want to make sure we do our research and understand who the customer is going to be, male versus female, the age groups and, of course, what's the latest trend."
Killen, who has a bachelor's degree in interior design and started at GM as a colour and trim designer in 2006, noted purple is a popular trend in fashion and interiors -- and that leads car designers to start pulling hints of purple into the automotive sector.
"We want to have colours that read luxury, and we want them to be sophisticated, depending upon which brand. So for the Buick Regal, a deep purple would be beautiful -- maybe that goes a slightly grey, to keep it somewhat masculine."
Green is starting to come back, she said, which is surprising because in the past when green was up, blue was down, in terms of popularity. But now, they appear to almost be on par.
"At the North American auto show, I counted all the blue vehicles and all the green vehicles, and there were only a couple more blue than green," Killen noted.
And just as fashion runs in cycles, so too do car colours -- with some tweaking.
Ten years ago, brown cars were more like a yellow-brown, a little bit dirtier looking, Killen said.
"And now we're starting to see these rich cocoas, sort of moving off of the whole Starbucks movement where a latte has a little bit of cream in it, so it's very rich."
As she walked from a pearl white Buick Regal over to a couple of sports cars, Killen explained that someone purchasing one of a limited number of Synergy Green Camaros, for instance, is an individual -- "because not everybody on the street is going to have this."
A buyer opting for the Hugger Orange Camaro is definitely someone who wants to be seen, and "it does scream performance," she added.
The personality type that chooses a black or white car is more of "your safe customer."
"Somebody who wants to have a sophisticated-looking car, the black tends to make the car appear smaller. So if you're driving a larger SUV, the black will have a nice read on it," she said.
"And somebody's probably going to keep the car for a number of years, it's going to have a nice resale value on it."
In Europe, she said, the top-selling car colour is silver. By comparison, smaller cars in the Asian market are brighter and come in more colours.
"Pink in Asia is crazy. Our Korea colour and trim department released a pink, and they didn't think it was going to do very well. And it's done, like, 23 per cent of their volume. It's huge. It's huge."
Killen says because of the Internet and the way people around the globe interact, some of the trend research is starting to make its way into North America.
"So maybe we'll start having some pink cars. I think it would be really cool."
